Efficacy of Biofeedback Training in Overcoming Academic Procrastination

Page: 250-256
Sukhminder Kaur, Simarjeet Kaur, and Ramanpreet Kaur (Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab)

People often put off a task because they do not want to do it and eventually they fritter away hours on trivial pursuits while delaying the tasks or assignments they are supposed to perform. This tendency of voluntarily delaying an intended course of action has been considered as a consequence of self-regulation failure and having deleterious outcomes for well-being and performance in different periods of life. Procrastination in academic realm holds many negative outcomes for students like higher stress, lower grades and poor health which further influence their academic and social functioning. The objective of current research was to evaluate the effectiveness of biofeedback training in reducing academic procrastination. It was hypothesized that post intervention scores on procrastination, fear of failure and task aversiveness would be significantly lower as compared with pre intervention scores of experimental group. A pre- post experimental control group design was used. PASS scale was used to identify academic procrastinators who were higher on fear of failure and task aversiveness. Further, participants who were frequent procrastinators and willing to lessen their propensity to delay were randomly assigned to experimental (n=75) and control (n=75) groups. Participants of experimental group were given biofeedback training comprised of eight sessions thrice a week in individual sessions. No training was given to control group participants. At the completion of training sessions, participants of both groups were again assessed on PASS scale. The results showed that biofeedback training was effective in reducing procrastination (F= 133.62), fear of failure (F= 243.89) and task aversiveness (F= 76.75) in participants of experimental group. On the other hand, control group participants did not show any statistical significant change pertaining to procrastination and its contributing factors.