Struggling with self: The personal projects of students seeking psychological counselling

Personal projects can be described as self-articulated goals and related sequences of actions. In order to investigate what kind of personal projects people with psychological problems have, and how they work on them, 28 counselling client students, 44 students of psychology, and 45 students of technology completed a Finnish version of Little's (1987) Personal Project Inventory. The results showed that the clients scored lower on project accomplishment than other groups. Their personal projects were frequently self-related, while those of the technology students were often task-related. The higher their sense of coherence, self-esteem, mental health and life satisfaction, the more subjects expected to accomplish their projects, the more frequently they described task-related projects, the less negative affect they reported, and the less frequently they described self-related projects. These results suggest that psychologically distressed individuals struggle with self-related projects and have problems in accomplishing their projects.     

Development of sense of coherence during two group interventions

Kähönen, K., Näätänen, P., Tolvanen, A. & Salmela‐Aro, K. (2012). Development of sense of coherence during two group interventions. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 523–527. Burnout is a serious occupational hazard. This study investigated the possibility to develop an effective salutogenic group intervention among employees suffering from severe burnout symptoms. Participants consisted of employees aged 31 to 59 years working in different public service occupations, such as police officers, tax officers, (and other public service officers), and assigned to three different groups: analytic (N = 25), psychodramatic (N = 24) and controls (N = 28). The intervention comprised 16 separate days over a nine‐month period. Changes in sense of coherence (SOC) were measured four times with the 13‐item Orientation to Life Questionnaire during the intervention and at six‐month follow‐up, and analyzed by general linear model (GLM) and using Cohen’s d to estimate effect sizes. Change in SOC between the three groups was statistically significant (F(4,148) = 2.65, p = 0.036). The psychodrama group showed a higher increase in SOC than the analytic group during the intervention, while the improvement in the analytic group was significant during the six‐month follow‐up. Total effect size from baseline to follow‐up was in the analytic group 0.71, in the psychodrama group 0.47, and in the control group from baseline to end of intervention 0.09. The results show that it is possible to improve SOC by group intervention in the occupational healthcare context. The dialogue‐based analytic method and action‐based psychodramatic method differ in their specific effects.