The Effectiveness of Experiential Exercises on Emotional Competence and Optimistic-Pessimistic Attitude among Mothers of SOS Children Village

Today women have entered in diverse fields and are successful. Now-a-days many women have taken up professional roles to enhance therr fives. Women working in SOS village should be more emotionally competent and optimistic attitude in thoughts because the children from SOS village are living without their biological families for a variety of reasons. Hence the purpose of the study was to find out the effectiveness of Experiential Exercises on Emotional Competence and Optimistic and Pessimistic attitude among mothers of SOS children. The design of this study was before and after without control group design. Emotional Competence Scale by Sharma and Bhardwaj (1995) and Optimistic and Pessimistic Attitude Scale by Parashar (1989) and Training Program-Experiential exercises (Nandita, et al., 2011) were used as pre-test and post-test. The sample consisted of fifteen mothers (30 to 45 years) drawn from SOS village, Puducherry, India. All the mothers were included for the study as the experimental group and experiential exercise were given as training for eight weeks. Before and after the training, the mothers were evaluated with the battery of tests: Emotional competence scale and optimistic and pessimistic scale. Result showed that there is no relationship between emotional competence and optimistic-pessimistic attitude. The dimension scores are highly significant with the total sum scores of emotional competence except the dimension - adequate expression and control of emotions (AEC). A significant increase in emotional competence (p<l.01) was found but there is no significant change in optimistic and pessimistic attitude. This is the indication of the possible benefits of a trainig exercise focused on emotional competence. The mean difference of optimistic and pessimistic attitude showed slight difference which indicates when the length of the program increase, there may be a chance of decreasing negative attitude of the mothers.