Emotion-focused group therapy as a training intervention in a nonclinical sample of graduate students: a feasibility study

ABSTRACT

Emotion-focused group therapy (EFT-G) has only been formulated in the last decade and there is little evidence regarding its applicability. Our study aimed to investigate the feasibility of EFT-G in university students and exploring helpful and hindering events of EFT-G from the participants’ point of view. A pre-formed cohort of students (n = 16) within the same class participated in the quasi-experimental study without a control group. They completed 12 sessions of a modified version of the EFT-G. Participants were administered outcome measures at the first and last sessions. After each session, the participants reported their experiences using the HAT form. Pre-post quantitative outcome analysis results revealed a statistically significant but not clinically reliable decrease in emotion regulation difficulties and an improvement in self-compassion and subjective satisfaction with life. The results of the qualitative analysis revealed that helpful and hindering events were organized around a cluster related to the students’ experiences of themselves (e.g. Developing self-understanding, Feelings of empowerment) or a cluster related to other students in the group (e.g. Seeing others’ perspectives, Self-disclosure difficulties). The main limitations of the results are a lower adherence to the original EFT-G model and the characteristics of the group sample (e.g. preexisting class of students).

KEYWORDS:

• EFT-G
• feasibility
• university students
• helpful and hindering events

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

The authors made the following contributions. Lubor Pilarik: Conceptualization, Writing – Review & Editing, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Statistical Analysis, Qualitative Analysis; Petr Mikoska: Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; Michaela Ladmanova: Writing – Review & Editing, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Qualitative Analysis. The authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia [no. 359/2023]. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io) repository, https://osf.io/28bf6/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the VEGA project No. 1/0569/22 Emotional flexibility - emotion regulation strategies in changing conditions as mental health protective factors. The co-author (PM) declares that the work is the result of work in the field of science, research, creative activity, and long-term development of the Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Kralove and is financed from resources designed and provided for this purpose – supported by the competition for postdoctoral job positions at UHK.