Group climate is an important factor in group counseling and psychotherapy process and outcome research. The current investigation examined group climate changes (from early to late sessions) at the within-group (i.e., group members) and between-group (i.e., group-as-a-whole) levels in predicting changes in group members' emotional cultivation in group counseling. A total of 236 Taiwanese children and adolescents across 41 groups participated in this study. Members' ratings of group climate (i.e., engagement and conflict) were partitioned into within-group and between-group components, and polynomial regression with response surface analysis was used to examine the association between changes in group engagement and conflict (at the member-and group-level) from early to late group sessions on changes in emotional cultivation. Results supported the theoretical hypothesis that when a group-as-a-whole reported increasing engagement from early to late group sessions, relative to other groups (i.e., between-group effect), members of that group experienced greater growth in emotional cultivation. Results also indicated that group members reported greater growth in emotional cultivation when there was consistent and high engagement or consistent and low conflict from early to late group sessions. Public Significance StatementOur results showed that children and adolescents reported a greater growth in cultivating their emotions in the following conditions. The first condition is when a group-as-a-whole reported increasing engagement from early to late group sessions relatively to the other groups. The second condition is when a group member reported consistent and high engagement (or consistent and low conflict) at early and late group sessions relatively to the other group members.

Theoretically, group leaders can play a significant role in contributing to the effectiveness of group counseling intervention. However, very few studies have examined the group leader's effects on the clientrated group counseling outcomes. We hypothesized that responsive group leaders who were caring, understanding, and respectful could serve as safe havens and secure bases to facilitate their group members' social and emotional cultivation. The current investigation examined the effects of leader responsiveness on group members' social-emotional cultivation (SEC). A total of 307 Taiwanese children and adolescent clients across 53 groups participated in an eight-session emotional cultivation group intervention. There were five time points of data collection (i.e., preintervention, third group session, sixth group session, postintervention, and a 4-week follow-up), and the variance partitioning method was used to partition longitudinal data into within-member, within-group, and between-group variance components. The results of hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the group leader's responsiveness significantly predicted group members' SEC at each of the three levels of analysis: Individual members had greater change in SEC when (a) they perceived higher leader responsiveness in a time period compared to the average rating of leader responsiveness across all time periods, (b) they perceived higher leader responsiveness compared to the average rating of leader responsiveness across all members in the same group, and (c) the group-as-a-whole perceived higher leader responsiveness than the average rating of leader responsiveness across all groups. Public Significance StatementThe results show that group leader responsiveness is related to positive changes in social-emotional cultivation for children and adolescents participating in group counseling. The positive change in socialemotional cultivation occurred: (a) when the leader was more responsive in a given time period than they usually were, (b) when some group members saw the leader as more responsive than other members of the group, and (c) when a group-as-a-whole saw their leaders as more responsive than other leaders.