Technical-Vocational Students’ Emotional Functioning within the Bidimensional Mental Health Model

There has been an increasing interest in understanding emotionality within the bidimensional mental health model (BMHM). Considered as a comprehensive framework, BMHM underscores psychological well-being and distress as related but distinct constructs contributing to an individual's overall emotionality. Following its global empirical appeal, this study was an attempt to apply the BMHM to examine the emotional functioning of 213 adolescents from a technical-vocational institution in the Philippines. Employing a cross-sectional research design, data were collected through multiple self-report measures and subsequently analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Salient findings indicated that the majority of the participants were assessed with a healthy emotionality, while a small but comparable proportion reported unhealthy, diminished, and mixed emotionality. Variations in emotional functioning by gender and educational levels were significant. Additionally, participants’ quality of life and academic functioning were influenced by their emotional functioning. Implications for addressing the emotional needs of students and future research were discussed.