Intervenções positivas com adolescentes em contexto escolar: comparação entre modelos

Abstract

Positive psychology is a recent movement within psychology that emerges with the goal of studying the healthy aspects of individuals and how they act in promoting health and in the healthy development of the human being. Interventions within this movement aim to promote engagement, happiness and a sense of life in individuals. Interventions that promote health and well-being are important in all stages of life. However, adolescence has been shown to be an important developmental phase for building healthy adults. Due to biological, behavioral and cognitive changes, adolescents may present vulnerabilities or become involved in situations of risk, such as exposing themselves to situations of violence. In this study, positive interventions were studied in the school context with adolescents. The first article presents the results of a systematic review of interventions based on positive psychology with adolescents, without limitation of time and language. The results indicate that the studies of interventions with adolescents are not yet numerous due to the recent beginning of positive psychology. Due to this fact, many studies are adapted replications of the study realized by Seligman (2005). However, the results of such studies indicate the effectiveness of these interventions to increase positive factors that help the development of such population. The second article presents the results of the efficacy studies of two models of positive psychological interventions with adolescents between 13 and 17 years old (conventional psychological intervention and body intervention). Eight sessions were performed, with an average duration of 1 hour each. The results of the studies indicate that interventions in positive psychology have been shown to be effective in increasing the factors that promote mental health and wellbeing. As for factors considered at risk, there is no clear tendency for interventions to reduce symptoms. However, protection and risk factors can be independent variables and the protection factor can act as a risk moderator. In general, the corporal intervention had a better result when compared to the positive psychological intervention in the increase of protective factors and decrease of the negative affections. Future studies can test the empirical model of mediation or moderation of risk and protection variables. In addition, more studies comparing models.