EFFECTIVENESS OF EMOTIONAL COMPETENCY MODULE TRAIN-ING ON ADOLESCENTS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND AUTO-MATIC NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

Abstract

The current study aimed to measure the effect of emotional competency module training in increasing the emotional intelligence and decreasing automatic negative thoughts. A quasi-experiment with a pre and post-test design and a control group are used where 58 participants were chosen using multi-stage involving purposive, convenience and stratified sampling techniques; 32 in the experimental group and 26 in the control group. Findings showed that there was a significant difference between the pre and post-test of the experiment group for both overall emotional intelligence scores and automatic negative thoughts. The paired samples t-test analyses revealed a significant difference in the emotional intelligence scores between the pre-test (M =2.36, SD = 0.35) and post-test (M = 2.98, SD = 0.43) scores; t(31) = -6.02, p = 0.00 of the experimental group. The automatic negative thoughts scores between the pre-test (M = 50.88, SD = 0.35) and post-test (M = 40.94, SD = 18.27) of the experimental group was significant (t(31) = 3.024, p = 0.01). This suggest that the Emotional Competency Module was effective in improving emotional intelligence for the secondary school students and reducing the automatic negative thoughts by the participants. An important implication of this study lies in its credibility to be utilised by mental health practitioners to help enhance adolescents’ emotional control.