Abstract:

Introduction:
Completing a Master's Degree in General Health Psychology (Máster en Psicología General Sanitaria, MPGS) is the minimum requirement to practice clinical and health psychology in Spain. One of the competences that need to learn future General Health Psychologists (Psicólogos/as Generales Sanitarios, PGS) is to demonstrate emotion management skills for a successful interaction with patients and their families. Furthermore, emotional disorders are common in college students (around 20%), which may interfere with their future professional performance. Despite these aspects, MPGS programs do not normally include specific training in socio-emotional competences in their curricula. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a training on emotional regulation (ER) skills aimed to improve therapeutic competencies of the future PGS and, thus, improve their employability.

Methodology:
The sample of this study consisted of 81 students (86.4% of them female), with a mean age of 22.9 years (SD = 1.54, range 21-30), from three academic years (2020-23) of the MPGS at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). The training consisted of three workshops on mindfulness, cognitive flexibility and emotional exposure, each lasting 2 hours and applied over approximately 3 months. The number of times they had practiced the different skills during the workshops, as well as experiential avoidance (BEAQ), mindfulness skills (FFMQ), emotional regulation difficulties (DERS) and personality variables (neuroticism and extraversion assessed through the NEO-FFI) were assessed at pre (beginning of first semester) and post training (end of first semester) and at 6-month follow-up (end of the academic year). Linear mixed models were carried out to analyze the evolution of scores over time and the number of times they had practiced each skill was included as a covariate.

Results:
Preliminary results of this study have shown a main effect of time (after the training and at follow-up) with statistically significant reductions in BEAQ (F = 9.47, p < .001), DERS (F = 7.73, p = .001) and neuroticism (F = 4.08, p = .021) and increases in the FFMQ dimensions of Observation (F = 8.56, p < .001), Absence of Judgment (F = 8.63, p < .001) and Description of Experience (F = 6.24, p = .003). In addition, there was also found a main effect of the practice of mindfulness skills outside classroom and an interaction effect of the practice of cognitive flexibility skills (F = 4.35, p = .042 and F = 7.00, p = .002, respectively) with the FFMQ dimension “Description of Experience”. In both cases, a greater number of practices is related to higher scores on the variable.
Conclusions: Results of this study show preliminary effectiveness of the ER training to reduce experiential avoidance, difficulties in emotion regulation and neuroticism, as well as to increase mindfulness skills. The training also helped students generalize cognitive flexibility and mindfulness skills outside classroom, which was related with an improvement in the ability to “describe the experience”. This skill teaches students to label their experiences and express them in words to themselves and others, which may facilitate emotion regulation. Future studies with larger samples will help us to confirm these results.

Funding:
This project was funded by the University of Zaragoza (PIIDUZ_1_681).

Keywords:

Emotion Regulation, Master Degree, General Health Psychology.