Academic performance-related stress levels and reflective awareness: the role of the elicitation approach in an Italian University’s psychological counselling

ABSTRACT

We describe a university’s psychological counselling approach, based mainly on a form of dialogue known as an “Elicitation Interview”. It is a technical conversational situation in which a counsellor helps a student to raise his or her awareness of his/her educational experiences. It is a conversational approach that provides students with a reflective activity by means of guided reenactments of experiences of his or her relational difficulties, feelings of low self-efficacy, risky behaviours, physical and mental symptoms. This reflective activity seems to be a relevant step for helping them to consolidate coping and resilience skills. This paper present clinical examples of this type of interview. The data have been collected at the University of Salerno’s counselling service, Italy.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational self
• elicitation interview
• university counselling
• reflective awareness
• stress levels

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Giulia Savarese PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Salerno (Italy). She is also the Director of the Pyschological Counseling Center at the University of Salerno. Some of her areas of interest include perceived stress, student health, socio-materiality theory, personal identity and intercultural identity.

Antonio Iannaccone is a Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the Institut de Psychologie, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). His areas of interest include the effects of social interactions on cognitive development and learning processes, and the function of materiality in cognitive activity.

Monica Mollo PhD, is a researcher and lecturer of Developmental and Educational Psychology, and also works at the Psychological Counseling Center of the University of Salerno (Italy).

Oreste Fasano PhD, Nadia Pecoraro PhD, and Luna Carpinelli PhD, are Psychotherapists at the Psychological Counseling Center, University of Salerno (Italy).

Pierpaolo Cavallo is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the Department of Physics, University of Salerno (Italy), and a Research Associate at Complex Systems Institute, ISC-CNR, Rome (Italy).

ORCID

Giulia Savarese http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0974-6429

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the “Fondi Sos Savarese” - Dipartimento di Medicina, Chirurgia e Odontoiatria “Scuola Medica Salernitana” dell’Università di Salerno (Italy).