The purpose of this study was to develop and verify the effectiveness of a Cognitive Emotion Regulation Program for female middle school students. To achieve this purpose, the program was developed through literature review, needs assessment, expert v...
The purpose of this study was to develop and verify the effectiveness of a Cognitive Emotion Regulation Program for female middle school students. To achieve this purpose, the program was developed through literature review, needs assessment, expert validity verification, and a pilot study. The final program consisted of 10 sessions focusing on enhancing emotional clarity, strengthening adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, cognitively reappraising perceived parental psychological control, and mitigating relational aggression. To examine the effectiveness of the program, female middle school students in D Metropolitan City were assigned to an experimental group, a comparison group, and a control group. The experimental group participated in the cognitive emotion regulation program developed in this study, while the comparison group participated in an anger management program. The instruments used in this study measured emotional clarity, cognitive emotion regulation strategies, parental psychological control, and relational aggression. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA, independent sample t-tests, and paired sample t-tests. In addition, qualitative analyses of participants’ reflection journals and session evaluation forms were conducted. The findings of this study were as follows. First, the program was verified to have appropriate content validity and field applicability through expert validation and pilot testing. Second, compared to the comparison and control groups, the experimental group showed significant improvements in emotional clarity and adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, while maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies significantly decreased. Third, participants in the experimental group showed decreased perceptions of parental psychological control and demonstrated cognitive changes in reinterpreting parental behaviors more flexibly rather than perceiving them as negative control. Fourth, relational aggression significantly decreased in the experimental group, and these effects were maintained at follow-up. Qualitative analyses further revealed that participants became more likely to recognize their emotions in conflict situations and apply adaptive cognitive strategies to control aggressive impulses and resolve conflicts non-aggressively. In conclusion, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Program developed in this study was found to be effective in improving emotional and cognitive emotion regulation abilities, changing perceptions of parental psychological control, and ultimately reducing relational aggression among female middle school students. This study is meaningful in that it approached the problem of adolescent relational aggression from the perspective of cognitive emotion regulation and provided a practical intervention model applicable in school settings.