The effects of structured group art therapy programming to the happiness level, tendency of expressing the emotions,difficulties of emotion regulation and psychatric symtomps of the 15-18 age range adolescents

The purpose of this study by the author is to investigate the effects of structured group art therapy programming at the 15-18 age range adolescents happiness level, tendency of expressing the emotions, difficulties of emotion regulation and psychatric symtomps. The program was prepared by the author in 11 sessions with art therapy techniques by taking as a base of antecedent oriented and reaction oriented strategies which were taken from Gross' process model. The program demonstrates experiental and psycho-educational pattern where the structured art therapy techniques are used, as well as the strategies are learnt. In the structured group art therapy program the aim is to improve the happiness level and tendency of expressing emotions for adolescents by making them to use the assistance of art therapy techniques and art materials, additionally it is aimed to reduce emotion regulation difficulties of adoloscents by teaching cognitive strategies to them which are available in the program. The study were done by the participation of students for those have results at above average levels of emotion regulation difficulties level and psychiatric symptomps level according to evaluations. The students were participated to the research from the Pendik multi program highschool which is under Ministry National Education. 10 of students for experimental group and 10 of studenst for control group were assigned randomly from the total of 187 students who are educated in the eleven grade and twelve grade of the highschool. All collected data in the SPSS 21.0 program were analyzed, plus, in order to define the significant difference in between experimantel and control groups the Mann Whitney U test was used. The Wilcoxon analyze method was used to define the significant difference scores in between pre-test and final test. According to research results, for the final test scores among experimental and control groups it was revealed that there is a significant difference as an advantage for experimental group and it was detected that there is a significant difference between the score before the experiment and the score after experiment which were taken from the scales by students. According to research results ; it was found out that , the hostility sub-dimension was decreased at the level of psychatric symtopms and the impulsive sub-dimension was also decreased at the level of emotion regulation difficulty.The positive emotion sub-dimension was increased at the level of happiness,as well as,positive and proximity sub-dimensions were increased at the level of emotion express tendency.