Social Skills, Interpersonal Relationships, and Mental Health

Abstract

The academic program of psychology contemplates in its fundamental purposes that the graduated students are capable of developing personal and professional competencies that allow them to promote group processes in the labor, social, educational, and clinical areas through the use of scientific knowledge to carry out diagnosis, implementation, and psychological intervention from a humanistic perspective.

Generating recruitment, selection, and training actions for personnel, developing psychological profiles from different work environments based on job and task analysis, and formulating performance evaluation and work environment programs in companies and institutions.

I am finally designing and implementing community programs, group interventions, and psychosocial processes that improve the mental health of the population.

Consequently, the teaching of the Psychology professional who graduates from the Autonomous University of Nayarit is based on a humanistic perspective since it emphasizes its attention on the development of personal attributes and social skills that will allow graduates the possibility of integrating into the labor market and with the ability to adapt to social and labor demands efficiently.

Thus, the academic process carried out by the program students entails an obligation from the beginning to promote interpersonal relationships and the development of social skills.

In 2017, professors Dr. Alejandro Ochoa Pimienta and Dr. William Gabriel Puga Cobá were in charge of the disciplinary subject of the Existential-Humanistic Psychological Approach, which aims at a theoretical-practical evolution, that is, it is intended that the student combines three concepts that support the constructivist approach, that is; Being, Knowing and Doing, therefore it is not enough for students to only accumulate knowledge, it is also essential to carry out actions that allow them to influence the contexts in which they are immersed favorably; finally, that they manage to be genuine, human with the capacity to interact with empathy and with total acceptance of intersubjectivity in their field of interaction.

This proposal contemplates the human being from an integral perspective, that is, a complete perspective, since it addresses the different dimensions of being: biological, Psychological, Social, cultural, Spiritual, and Educational.

Goldstein (1978)[i] argues that social skills are a set of abilities and capacities that vary depending on people, situations, and context. Since this triad becomes a constant of interpersonal contact, these cycles of contact can favor inappropriate behaviors that, in turn, manifest themselves in frictions in daily social relationships, which are immersed in the daily life of the social being. These skills and capacities are applied in basic to advanced and instrumental activities.

Consequently, this work aimed to observe the social skills that prevail in groups of university students. Once the tendencies of the six groups contemplated in the Goldstein Social Skills Test (1978) were detected, a more in-depth analysis was carried out; for this purpose and taking advantage of the professional activity of the professors mentioned above, more applications of the same Test were carried out to different groups of people, which allowed to detect a constant behavior about group II of the Goldstein test. Based on the findings obtained, it was possible to theoretically link the trends with the construct of style and quality of life.