Aydın Adnan Menderes University Journal of Institute of Social Sciences, vol.6, no.2, pp.13-31, 2019
The aim of this study is to explore the effects of cognitive-behavioral group counseling on university students' automatic thoughts and dysfunctional attitudes. The study group consisted of 24 college students for experiment, placebo and control groups enrolled in a public university’s Faculties of Education and Literature departments. 12 sessions of cognitive-behavioral group counseling were performed with the experiment group, and 12 sessions of traditional group counseling activities were performed with the placebo group. No counseling intervention is applied to the control group. At the beginning of the group sessions, Turkish forms of Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ-30) and Dysfunctional Attidutes Scale (DAS-A) were applied to all three groups as pre-intervention and post-intervention at the end of the sessions as well as a two months interval follow-up assessment. The mean scores of the DAS-A and ATQ-30 pre-intervention and post-intervention scores of the experiment group were significantly decreased (p <.05) while there was no significant difference between the mean scores of the experiment group’s DAS-A and ATQ-30 post-intervention and follow-up scores (p > .05). No significant difference between the placebo and control group's DAS-A and ATQ-30 pre-intervention, post-intervention and follow-up scores (p > .05) was found. As a result, cognitive-behavioral group counseling was found to be effective in reducing the automatic thoughts and dys-functional attitudes of university students.