International Journal of Behavioral Sciences
Volume:17 Issue: 2, Summer 2023

Imposter Syndrome (IS) is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments.  This research was conducted in order to predict the IS in gifted students based on ego development, self-efficacy, and self-awareness.

The research was descriptive and correlational. All gifted students studying in middle schools in central Islamabad in the academic year 2020-2021 formed the statistical population of this research. For this purpose, 202 students were selected using the cluster sampling method and used the IS Questionnaire (Clans and Ames, 1978), the Ego Development Questionnaire (Markstrom et al., 1997), the Psychological Capital Questionnaire (Luthans et al., 2007), and the Spirituality Questionnaire (Donning and Parsian, 2009). The collected data were analyzed by SPSS version 26 and the significance level was considered 0.05.

The results of Pearson's correlation coefficient showed that there was a negative and significant relationship between self-efficacy and spiritual-health scores with IS in female students at the level of 0.05. Moreover, the regression analysis with the simultaneous entry method showed that the predictor variables together explained 43% of the variance of the IS scores among female students.

The findings of the present study suggest that the psychological structures under investigation can predict and explain IS in female students. The aim of developing and assembling educational programs is to improve students' self-efficacy. Therefore, school officials, community health officials, and mental health officials are encouraged to improve students' self-efficacy.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the positive intervention developed in this research in reducing the symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder and to compare it with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
This study was a semi-experimental research with a pretest-posttest control group design. The study sample included 45 people with generalized anxiety disorder who were selected by convenience sampling method by referring to the Welfare Counseling Center in Mashhad. The participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (positive/cognitive-behavioral) and one control group. For the experimental groups, positive intervention was performed for eight sessions and cognitive-behavioral therapy for 10 sessions.
The results suggested that positive intervention and cognitive-behavioral therapy significantly reduced anxiety, negative affect, interpretation bias, autobiographical memory bias and rumination, and significantly increased positive affect and psychological flexibility. Comparative results of positive intervention and cognitive-behavioral therapy demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of the two methods.
Due to the lack of a positive intervention protocol for generalized anxiety disorder and its effectiveness in improving more symptoms in this disorder, it is suggested that the effectiveness of the developed positive intervention protocol be further investigated by researchers and therapists.

The present study aimed to determine the mediating role of mentalization in the relationship between childhood trauma and attachment security in adulthood.
The statistical population of this descriptive-correlational study involved all individuals aged 18-60 years who had experienced childhood trauma, and the sample included 290 people who were selected by the convenience sampling method. The data collection period was from July to September 2020 and was conducted online. The participants answered the Questionnaire of Experiences in Close Relationships, Child Abuse, and Mentalization (reflective functioning) online. In addition, the statistical method of Structural Equation Modeling was used.
Findings indicated that the subscales of physical, sexual, emotional, and neglect (childhood trauma) had a significant negative relationship with the subscale of certainty in mentalization and a significant positive relationship with the subscale of uncertainty in mentalization. Physical, sexual, emotional, and negligence subscales indicated a significant positive relationship with attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance subscales. The mentalization certainty subscale had a significant negative relationship with the attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety subscales while the mentalization uncertainty subscale had a significant positive relationship with the attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety subscales.
The mediating role of mentalization between childhood trauma and attachment anxiety, and attachment avoidance were confirmed. In general, the results of this study supported the mediating role of mentalization in relation with childhood trauma and attachment security and indicated that a part of the dispersion related to attachment security in adulthood can be explained through childhood trauma mediated by mentalization. These findings can be used for designing preventive and therapeutic interventions for trauma and attachment problems by improving mentalization (reflective functioning).

 Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for the recovery of adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa (AN), and parental involvement plays a pivotal role in early intervention. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore Iranian parents’ challenges before and after seeking out professional help for the treatment of their adolescent with AN and what they required during this process. 
Through purposeful sampling, 15 parents of adolescents with AN from several cities of Iran participated in this qualitative study. Data was gathered through online in-depth semi-structured interviews in Google Meet platform between July 2022 and October 2022, and was analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
 Overall, seven group experiential themes emerged from the interviews. The challenges included four main themes: lack of mental health literacy, misdiagnosis or delays in eating disorders recognition, lack of eating disorder specialists and centers, and parental burnout. In addition, the needs consisted of three main themes: familiarity with eating disorders, parent management training, emotional and societal support.
 Iranian healthcare providers can consider the challenges and the needs of parents identified in this study to provide the best practice for the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric AN with minimum potential deficits.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a common mental health threat among youth and adolescents with various etiology factors. Extensive treatments have been proposed for this disorder, but there is a need for a therapeutic package with good efficiency and effectiveness. This study aimed to develop and validate a process-based therapeutic package for patients with NSSI disorder.
This was an applied study in terms of objective and qualitative in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the study consisted of psychology experts in Tehran, Iran in 2022. Twenty-three effective university professors who worked in this domain were selected via purposive selection sampling. The design and validation of the program were performed in four stages and 14 steps: reviewing the theoretical background and existing packages, developing the content of the package, validating it, and explaining the validation.
Grounded theory as a qualitative method was used to conceptualize the content. Investigator triangulation facilitated the data validation. Percent agreement of inner raters and content validity index (CVI) were used for assessment reliability and validity. The reliability of the program based on the percent agreement of inner rater was 0.98; CVR and CVI of all the sessions were 0.93 and 0.99, respectively.
This study proposed process-based therapy package for non-suicidal self-injury disorder that is a reliable and valid comprehensive psychological therapy. This package is suggested to be used by expert in this domain to enhance the effectiveness of it.

Adequate sleep may help regulate emotions, which in turn may influence moral decision-making. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between sleep quality, emotion regulation and moral decision-making.
In this descriptive online survey, we administered three questionnaires, including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Moral Decision-Making Questionnaire, to 306 non-randomly selected employees of the Iranian National Tax Administration who were surveyed via the Internet between December 2021 and January 2022.
Analysis of data based on Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient showed no significant relationship between sleep quality with emotion regulation and decision-making and most of their subscales. Only a weak direct relationship was observed between some indicators of poor sleep quality (poor subjective sleep quality, sleep disturbances, and use of sleep medications) and utilitarian low-conflict direct moral decision-making.
According to findings it can be stated that for people who have sufficient cognitive capacity, time to manage their emotions, and access to society's established moral values, poor sleep quality may not be significantly associated with poor emotion regulation and moral decision-making.

Marital life is always affected by various factors, and one example can be marital conflict. The goal of the present study was to investigate the couple's identity gaps in disturbed married women's relationships and discover the factors that cause these identified gaps.
This research is a qualitative content analysis with a conventional approach. The study included all the disturbed married women of Shiraz city in 2022. The purposeful sampling method was used to collect the sample in this research. The data for the research was collected through semi-structural interviews. Theoretical saturation was achieved with 16 interviewees and the data were collected and analyzed.
The interviews underwent analysis and coding, resulting in the identification of 173 concepts, 32 subcategories, and eight main categories. These eight main categories encompass Communication breakdown, lack of empathic understanding, individualism, lack of acceptance, lack of mutual investment in the relationship, feeling insecure, comprehensive dissatisfaction, and marriage without commitment.
It appears that the gaps in a couple's identity can be attributed to a combination of individual factors and communication issues, which ultimately lead to confusion in their communication patterns. Consequently, it is recommended that counselors and couple therapists utilize the findings of this study when conducting premarital counseling and couple therapy at counseling centers.

Pain plays a crucial role in symptoms felt by women during menstrual cycles. There are a large number of styles to cope with menstrual pain. The present study aimed to identify women’s common tendency to select unprompted methods to cope with premenstrual pain.
This systematic review was carried out on related articles indexed by scientific databases including Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus and ProQuest. According to keywords, the valid English articles published from 2002 to 2022 were browsed and extracted. The current study, was profited from the PRISMA systematic review reporting guideline and was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42022371744). In the present research, considering specified inclusion and exclusion criteria, 17 of 328 proper articles with a population of 4544 persons were evaluated.
Findings implied that the majority of methods used by females to cope with premenstrual pain tend to be derived from behavioral components rather than other elements such as cognitive and emotional components.
Women of different ages, depending on the adopted lifestyle, try to improve adaptation to pain by engaging in behaviors to cope with premenstrual pain. It is essential to consider these unprompted methods when using or formulating a treatment to improve the condition of women with premenstrual pain complaints.