It is one of important tasks for university students, who start to enter the time of adulthood , to establish a relationship with others. New circumstance asks university students to be more active to make a relationship with others, which makes them frustrated. One of the concepts to explain the cause of interpersonal difficulty is social self-efficacy, which means expectation and belief on his/her capability to leave a good impression by using appropriate skills in various social situations.
As far as social efficacy is concerned, the study of the close relevance of emotions has been raised and especially positive emotion is drawing attention because of recent prevailing positive psychology. Broaden-and-built theory about positive emotion is Fredirickson(2001) theory that positive emotion itself is experienced and disappears in a short period of time, however, the process of positive emotion’s occurrence and disappearance creates personal resource , which lasts long and makes person’s improvement in a positive way. And the next experience of positive emotion is generated again through it. In this study, Fredrickson’s broaden theory-based positive emotion broaden program which enhances social efficacy with three emotions, thanks, love and hope is conducted.
Questions of this study are as follows. First, is positive emotion broaden program effective to enhance social efficacy? Second, is positive emotion broaden program effective to promote thanks emotion? Third, is positive emotion broaden program effective to improve love emotions? Fourth, is positive emotion broaden program effective to improve hopeful emotions?
The subjects of the study was university students in GwangJu who have interpersonal difficulties. They were randomly divided into eight for controlled group and eight for experiment group. positive emotion broaden program was conducted by one session for two hours, total ten sessions for twenty hours, and both pre-investigation and post-investigation were done for the effectiveness verification.
Date analysis by SPSS 18.0 program was done. The effect of the Pre and post investigations were conducted by analysis of frequency and non-parametric statistical analysis and Mann-Whitny U test for verifying prior homogeneity of controlled group and experiment group, Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test for analyzing the pre and post grade gap of social efficacy, thanks , love, hope of both groups.
The conclusion of this study is as follows. First, there was relevant changes for the experiment group participating in the program for the improvement of social efficacy. Second, there was the promotion of the experiment group’s positive emotion, thanks emotion after the positive emotion broaden program. Third, seeing that love emotion of the experiment group had relevant changes, there was enhancement of love emotion by the positive emotion broaden program. Fourth, seeing that thanks emotion of the experiment group had relevant changes, there was enhancement of thanks emotion by the positive emotion broaden program. These results show that positive emotion broaden program influences relevantly on the enhancement of social efficacy, thanks, love , hope emotions.