Effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Emotion Regulation and Quality of Life of Mothers of Children with Intellectual Disability

The aim of current research was to investigate the effect of acceptance and commitment based therapy on emotion regulation and quality of life of mothers of children with intellectual disability.
This is a pretest- posttest control group quasi-experimental research. The population of the study consisted of the mothers of students with intellectual disability in Karaj-Iran in the school year 2014-2015. Convenience sampling was used to recruit 30 participants. The participants were assigned to experimental and control groups in equal numbers. The experimental group participated in 8 sessions of acceptance and commitment based therapy. The control group received no intervention. The research instruments were The Emotion Regulation Scale (ER) and Quality of Life (QOL) questionnaires. Analysis of covariance (ANVOVA) was used to analyze the data.
The results showed a statistically significant difference between post-test scores of the experimental and control group following receiving training in acceptance and commitment based therapy in favor of the experimental group (p>0.01) in terms of emotion regulation and quality of life of mothers of children with intellectual disability (p>0.01).
It can be concluded that acceptance and commitment based therapy interventions leads to increasing emotion regulation and quality of life of mothers of children with intellectual disability.