Abstract
Metacognitive skills and agency are among the main psychological abilities a clinical psychologist should have. This study aimed to assess the efficacy of group psychodynamic counselling as a clinical training device able to enhance metacognitive skills and agency in final-year undergraduates in clinical psychology within an educational context. Thirty-three final-year students of clinical psychology participated in an experiential laboratory lasting two months. Participants completed measures regarding metacognitive skills and agency at pre-, post-treatment, and 3-month follow-up assessment. The results suggested that group psychodynamic counselling made students feel more capable of recognizing emotional states, understanding causal relationships, inferring mental states of others in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, and expectations, and thinking critically. Furthermore, the group psychodynamic counselling helped students to feel more able to derive pathways to desired goals and to motivate themselves via agency thinking to use those pathways. Thus, the study confirmed the efficacy of group psychodynamic counselling as a clinical training device able to enhance metacognitive skills and agency in future clinical psychologists.
Highlights
Metacognitive skills and agency are among the main psychological abilities a clinical psychologist should have
Some research has demonstrated the efficacy of learning cognitively-oriented laboratories in enhancing metacognitive skills and agency in students (e.g., Kuiper, 2002), to our knowledge no previous studies have assessed whether a psychodynamically-oriented laboratory can effectively enhance these skills in future clinical psychologists
At the end of each group psychodynamic counselling session—with the exception of the last session where the following structure was inverted—the two groups were joined together in a long day of classes conducted by a teacher in clinical psychology who worked through traditional methods, such as readings related to psychodynamic counselling or clinical cases
Summary
Metacognitive skills and agency are among the main psychological abilities a clinical psychologist should have. This study aimed to assess the efficacy of group psychodynamic counselling as a clinical training device able to enhance metacognitive skills and agency in final-year undergraduates in clinical psychology within an educational context. With the aim of promoting these skills in a group of future clinical psychologists, we conducted a learning laboratory with undergraduates at the beginning of their last year of the Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology program at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy), which is strongly characterized by a psychodynamic foundation Due to this specific foundation, we decided to use the group psychodynamic counselling as a clinical training device, assessing its effectiveness in enhancing metacognitive skills and agency. The innovation of the current study is in its assessment of the effectiveness of a psychodynamic intervention carried out within an educational context to enhance metacognitive skills and agency in a non-clinical sample (i.e., students in clinical psychology)
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