Effect of Resilience Education on Cognitive Appraisals, Coping and Emotions

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of resilience education program on girl students ‘cognitive appraisals, proactive coping and positive and negative emotional experiences. In this true-experimental study with pretest-posttest control-group design in company with follow up stage, 32 girl students aged 12 year olds in experimental and control groups responded to the Stress Appraisal Measure-Revised (Rowley, Roesch, Jurica & Vaughn, 2005), the Proactive Coping Inventory (Greenglass, Schwarzer, Jakubiec, Fiksenbaum & Taubert, 1999) and the Modified Differential Emotions Scale (Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh & Larkin, 2003). The experimental group received 10 resilience training sessions (1 hours a session). The results statistical procedures of multivariate and univariate covariance analysis indicated that resilience education program was effective in increasing challenging and resource appraisals, proactive coping strategy and positive emotions and in decreasing threat appraisal and negative emotions in short term and long term. These findings suggest that resilience training program by increasing positive thinking strategies, adaptive emotional management skills and interpersonal relationships skills enrichment could result in mental immunization in students.