Investigating the effectiveness of re-decision-making components training on reducing academic self-handicapping and increasing courage among the third male students of the conservatory.

Dissertation for Master's Degree in Educational Psychology

Abstract

     Objective: The aim of the current research was the effectiveness of teaching the components of the re-decision approach on reducing self-handicapping and increasing students' boldness. The method of this research was a semi-experimental research with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The research population includes all third-year male students of the 9th education district of Tehran, who were studying in the academic year of 1992-1993. One school was selected from among the boys' schools in the 9th education district of Tehran through cluster sampling, and after the implementation of the self-handicapping and assertiveness questionnaire on all third-year students, the two classes that scored the highest score in self-handicapping and the lowest score in assertiveness were randomly replaced in two experimental and control groups. The components of the re-decision approach were implemented in the experimental group and the control group did not receive any intervention. Result: For the statistical analysis, the research data was analyzed in two parts, descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the studied groups and the research hypothesis is confirmed. (p<0.001)

Findings: Teaching the components of re-decision is effective in reducing self-disability and increasing daring. Keywords: self-disability, daring, re-decision, mutual behavior analysis, gestalt therapy. Introduction and problem statement After the end of childhood, a person enters a stage whose conditions are completely different from the previous period. This period is known as adolescence (Akbari 1381). In the culture and context, the transition from the childhood stage to the adult stage in the gradual stages of life is called adolescence, which is accompanied by a deep transformation in the body and mind and the power of visualization and imagination. The period of adolescence starts from the age of 12 and continues until the end of the second decade of human life. In the writings of the Egyptian papyrus about 4000 years ago, concerns were expressed about the situation of teenagers, and in the oldest studies that have been done in the field of teenagers, the great Greek philosophers have taken a special place. (Sharfi, 2013)

Adolescence is considered one of the most important periods in the process of personal and social development. Entering this period usually begins with puberty, sexual instinct blossoming, stabilization and consolidation of occupational and social interests and interests, desire for freedom and independence are important features of this period. Due to the pressure of instincts and the desire to follow teenage values, and the group pressure of the desire to express oneself, Pirizi's independent life puts him in an intellectual crisis and a psychological turmoil. (Faru'aldin et al., 2012)

One of the factors that affects the progress and academic status of students is the use of self-disability strategy. The origin of self-impairment should be sought in personality theories and especially in the psychoanalytic perspective. Murray [1] (1983) believes that every person needs to defend himself against criticism and blame, attack and attack or to justify it with a reason. Adler[2] (1907) also believes that every human being is born with a potential container, which sometimes uses that defect as an excuse to refrain from doing difficult tasks or to justify failure, and in this way makes excuses.

According to this theory, when faced with others, people try to attribute failure to external factors such as luck and task difficulty, and success to internal factors such as talent and ability. (Heider [3], 1958)

     After that, two researchers named Berglas and Jones [4] (1978) noticed that sometimes people, instead of justifying their performance after receiving feedback, use strategies in advance to justify the possible failure. They called these strategies self-handicapping strategies, because their use leads to weakening of performance.

Self-handicapping strategies are some of the preconditions that people provide, in the hope that they will replace factors that may doubt their competence in the future.

Recently, research on self-disability has also entered the field of education. It seems that some students deliberately do not try, postpone their studies until the last minute, spend the night before the exam in idleness, or use other self-handicapping strategies to reduce the negative implications of possible failure. (Shekar Ken, 2014)

The use of self-handicapping strategies is related to the age of the student, because for the purposeful use of this strategy, they must reach the age when they acquire the necessary cognitive ability to distinguish between effort and ability, which usually children from teenage years onwards believe that good performance without effort, or with little effort, is a sign of high ability, or vice versa, failure after a lot of effort is a sign of lack of ability (Nichols and Miller[5] 1984). Self-impairment is already used in situations where the probability of success is low. One of the social skills that is emphasized in modern psychology, especially health psychology, is daring, which is assumed to be the basis of achieving healthy behavior (Shabanipour 1386). Volpe [7] (1975) returns. They realized that some people cannot get their rights, so these two researchers tried to teach them the skill of self-expression. Courage includes asserting one's rights, expressing one's thoughts, opinions, and feelings in an appropriate, direct, and honest way, so as not to destroy the rights of others, and it is also a behavior that enables a person to act in his own interest, without any anxiety, to have a self-reliant behavior, his true feelings. to express his feelings honestly and get his right by taking into account the rights of others. (Harji, 2005)

According to Wolpe (1982), boldness is the appropriate and correct expression of any kind of emotion other than anxiety towards another person. The presence of such a behavior in a person causes him to express his feelings and emotions in front of the behavior of others, which can include a wide range of contempt to irritation, without fear and in a correct way. Albuti and Ammons (1975) consider courageous behavior as standing in the preservation of human dignity and influence, and in this way they draw a decisive line between this concept and aggressive behavior. It is one of the most challenging specialized fields, and psychotherapy is considered one of the most important due to its direct relationship with physical and mental health. The field of psychotherapy is as old as human creation and as young as the fields of psychiatry and psychology. (Corey [8] 2001, translated by Bahari et al., 2006)

The first time that the theory of exchange analysis was presented and offered to the public was in 1975 and at a professional conference in Los Angeles. In 1961, Byrne published the book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, in which he described the main points of his view. His followers added other contents to it and corrected its practical action. In exchange analysis, the role of environment and social communication is very important. However, ultimately people are responsible for their own life and behavior and a person should accept this responsibility and pay attention to his role in life more than any other factor. (Firouz Bakht, 2006)

The treatment of re-decision making [9] is based on concepts such as rulings, primary decisions and new decisions. Re-decision therapy is a form of transactional analysis that provides a useful framework for understanding how learning from childhood extends into adulthood. This approach is based on the assumption that adults make decisions based on past assumptions that were once appropriate for satisfying their vital needs but are no longer valuable. This approach emphasizes the capacity to change initial decisions and is oriented towards increasing the individual's awareness, with the aim of empowering clients to change their life course. In re-decision therapy, clients learn how the rules they learned and incorporated in childhood affect their actions. (Corey 2001, translated by Etemadi and Hashemi Azar, 1385)

Golding [10] 1978) notes that primary decisions are not based on an intellectual state but on an emotional state.