Development of Psychological Empowerment Comprehensive Package and its Effectiveness on University Students’ Health-Oriented Academic Lifestyle Behaviors

This study aimed to develop a university students’ comprehensive psychological empowerment package and to determine its effectiveness onhealth-oriented academic lifestyle behaviors. With a quasi-experimental study, 36 students in the experimental group (18 subjects) and control group (18 subjects) before and after training, responded to the health-oriented academic lifestyle facilitator/preventive questionnaire (Salehzadeh, Shokri & Fathabadi, 2017a). The experimental group received 10 sessions of the empowerment package (2 hours a session). The results indicated that the psycho-educational package was effective in increasing the rate of referrals to behaviors such as academic optimism, academic engagement, and academic resilience, and in decreasing the rate of referrals to behaviors such as learned helplessness, avoidance of help-seeking, passive aggression, self-handicapping, avoidance of effort, academic dishonesty and maladaptive perfectionism. The findings suggest that attempting to enhance the interpersonal skills of the participants by helping them to expand their psychological capital and their psychosocial resources such as optimism, coping behaviors, resilience, psychological control, self-esteem, ambiguity tolerance and social support, and subsequent empowerment of individuals to reduce stressful experiences, adaptation to negative events and maintain satisfactory relationships with other, mayresult in mental immunization in students.