Comparison the Effectiveness of Group Therapy based on Compassion and Group Reality Therapy on Psychological Hardiness in Mothers with Autistic Children

The aim of present study was comparison the effectiveness of group therapy based on compassion and group reality therapy on psychological hardiness in mothers with autistic children.

The study was quasi-experimental with pre-test, post-test and follow-up design with control group. The research population was mothers with autistic children referred to counseling and psychotherapy centers forautistic children of Tehran city in the second half of 2018 year. The research sample was 45 people who were selected by available sampling method and randomly with lottery assignedinto 2 experimental groups and 1 control group. Each of the experimental groups was trained for 8 sessions of 90 minutes, separately with methods of group therapy based on compassion and group reality therapy and the control group was placed on the waiting list for training. The data were collected with the scale of psychological hardiness (Kobasa et al., 1982) and analyzed with the methods of analysis of variance with repeated measurements and Bonferroni's post hoc test in SPSS software.

The findings showed that both intervention methods of group therapy based on compassion and group reality therapy in compared to the control group led to increase the psychological hardiness and all its three components including commitment, control and challenge in mothers with autistic children and the results remained in the follow-up phase (P<0.05), but between the intervention methods there was no significant difference in the increase of psychological hardiness and all its three components among them (P>0.05).

The results indicated the effectiveness of both intervention methods of group therapy based on compassion and group reality therapy on increasing psychological hardiness and all its three components and no significant difference between them. Therefore, the use of the mentioned methods along with other effective treatment methods can play an effective role in improving the psychological hardiness.