Mentalizing students' relationship with university: the group counselling for underachieving students

The study presents an innovative mentalizing group counselling targeted to underachieving students. From a mentalization perspective, underachievers are conceived as high-functioning individuals as they do not necessarily show any signs of impairment in their mentalizing abilities. They might show: Reduced capacities to mentalize in contexts that evoke strong emotions which lead to a reactivation of feeling of insecurity, negative self-representations and stress; A difficulty in recovering their mentilizing ability under stress and in swiching from automatic to controlled mentalization; A rigid and stereotiped way of intepreting their relation with the university (Esposito, Karterud & Freda, submitted). The aims of the study were: a) to investigate whether the group members' Reflective Function/mentalization increased during the course of NMP sessions (and improved their student performance); b) if certain counselors' interventions proved to be particularly useful in this respect. Process analysis showed that interpretations of the counsellor promoted mentalizating improvements in group members and this was paralleled to improvements in the academic performance. The relevance of the innovative role of interpretations in the mentalization based treatments was discussed.