The Effects of Existential Therapy on Metacognitive Skills, Loneliness, and Failure Tolerance in Undergraduate Psychology Students

 Numerous students may, for the first time, distance themselves from family members and their social and emotional support and feel doubt, confusion, and anxiety, leading to loneliness and frustration. Students are exposed to various psychological traumas due to loneliness, poor failure tolerance, and metacognitive skills. With the prevailing conditions of society, young individuals (students) require to receive existential therapy and increase metacognitive skills to cope with feelings of loneliness and tolerance of failure individually and socially, compared to other age groups. They play a crucial role in forming a healthy community. Thus, the present study aimed at determining the effects of existential therapy on metacognitive skills, loneliness, and failure tolerance among undergraduate psychology students.

 This was a semi–experimental study with an unequal control group design. The statistical population of this study included all psychology students in the undergraduate course of Islamshahr Azad University in the academic year of 2018–2019. The research sample consisted of 30 male and female individuals selected by convenience and voluntary sampling method. They were then randomly divided into the experimental and control groups (n=15/group). The inclusion criteria included being undergraduate psychology students of Islamshahr University (5th semester), urban residence, both genders, and the age range of 21–26 years. The exclusion criterion included absence from more than one session. Initially, there was a call for existential therapy classes at Islamshahr University. Using G–Power software, the minimum sample size was estimated to be 29 subjects to achieve a statistical power of 0.8, an effect size of 0.8, and a significance level of 0.05. Data collection tools in the pretest and posttest stages included the Metacognitive State Inventory (Anil and Abedi, 1996), Loneliness Scale (Russel, 1996), and Frustration Discomfort Scale (Harrington, 2005). The experimental group received ten 90–min weekly existential therapy sessions according to Prochaska and Norcross's treatment protocol (2010); however, the controls received no intervention. In the descriptive statistics section, mean and standard deviation were calculated. The inferential statistics section applied the Chi–squared test and Univariate Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). The analyses were performed in SPSS.

 The collected results suggested that existential therapy increased metacognitive skills (p=0.032), improved failure tolerance (p<0.001), and decreased loneliness (p=0.001) in students. Additionally, considering the effect size, existential therapy was very influential on loneliness (η2p= 0.348), failure tolerance (η2p=0.853), and metacognitive skills (η2p=0.158); however, the highest effect of existential therapy concerned failure tolerance.

 According to the present study results, existential therapy, as a treatment method affecting metacognitive skills, failure tolerance, and loneliness in students, is particularly important.