The Efficacy of Empathy and Anger Management Training on Response Inhibition in Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Oppositional defiant disorder is one of the most common disruptive behavior disorders. The aim of this research was to study the effectiveness and comparing empathy and anger management trainings on response inhibition in children with oppositional defiant disorder.
The method of research is experimental and research design is pretest- posttest with several groups. The statistical population consisted of all boy students of seventh and eighth grades with oppositional defiant disorder in 2014-2015 academic years in Sari. For data collection, the rating scale of oppositional defiant disorder for children (Hommerson et al., 2006), the structured clinical interview (First et al., 1999) and stroop color-word test (Koumali et al., 1968) were used. For experimental groups, empathy training and anger management training was executed at 8 weekly sessions in 60 minutes whereas control groups had no training.
The results of data analysis using Kruskal -Wallis showed that empathy training and anger management training can improve response inhibition in children with oppositional defiant disorder (p These results of this research can be used for empathy and anger management trainings alongside academic learning periods for children with oppositional defiant disorder so that by teaching them the incident and intensity of oppositional defiant disorder be prevented from turning to other disorders.