Ad hoc emotional regulation intervention program for a group of Spanish social workers

Abstract

On several occasions, social workers experience symptoms of an anxious depressive nature, due to their work and the stress derived from it. For this reason, we aimed to design an ad hoc emotional management intervention program to evaluate its impact, combining quantitative and qualitative information. The study developed a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, performing T-tests on related sample. The ad hoc intervention program was developed for a group of social workers living in a rural area of Spain. The study also included a control group that did not receive any intervention. The Bar-On ICE, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the BCSQ-36 were used to evaluate the Emotional Intelligence factors, the Burnout syndrome and the Empathy processes. Most of the emotional intelligence and empathy factors showed statistically significant differences between the pretest and the posttest, in favor of the latter for the participants of the training. The control group’s T2 results worsened, as they had not received any form of intervention. This paper will discuss how these participants have incorporated the key takeaways of the intervention program in their emotional management at work.