Psychological Well-Being and Self-Efficacy in Life Skills among Italian Preadolescents with Positive Body Esteem: Preliminary Results of an Intervention Project
The main purpose of this project will be to increase the psychological well-being, self-efficacy in life skills, and body esteem in a group of Italian preadolescents who will participate in the life skills training. This project will be divided into three phases consisting of a verification of the changes that will take place following the realization of laboratory activities useful to enhance the psychological well-being of students in the scholastic context. For the first phase, an exploratory analysis of the main life skills, psychological well-being and body esteem levels was carried out with 49 participants aged 12 to 14 years recruited from three classes of a Public Junior School in Catania (Sicily, Italy). We used the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving-CIT (Andolfi et al., 2017), the Perceived Self-efficacy Scales in Life Skills (Sagone & Indiana, 2017), and the Body Esteem Scale (Confalonieri et al., 2008). Results showed positive correlations between perceived self-efficacy in life skills and almost all factors of psychological well-being, as well as positive correlations between perceived self-efficacy in life skills and body esteem; in detail, the weight satisfaction was mainly related with self-efficacy in managing of negative emotions and poorly with self-efficacy in interpersonal communication; in addition, the external evaluation from the others regarding own body image was positively correlated with self-efficacy in managing of positive emotions. In the intermediate phase, these preadolescents will attend the specific training about the life skills during the school time in order to increase these abilities and enhance well-being at school. At the third phase, we will compare the final results with the initial ones to verify the efficacy of the abovementioned training. This project will be useful to deep the role of life skills as mediators between psychological well-being and self-esteem.
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