Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on Self-Regulation and Self-Control of the Adolescents with Drug Abuse Disorder

Considering the significance of psychological interventions in adolescents with drug abuse disorder, and due to the fact that self-regulation and self-control are the most important components of drug abuse, the aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on these two components.
This research is semi-experimental. It is conducted in the form of posttest and pretest implemented on two experimental and control groups; the sample has consisted of all the adolescents with drug abuse disorder who referred to addiction clinics of Isfahan. Among them, thirty adolescents are chosen based on available sampling and randomly placed in two experimental and control groups; fifteen persons in each group.Tangney self-control questionnaire and SRI-S self-regulation scale were used as research instruments and filled in by the participants in the pretest and posttest stages. Eight sessions of one-hour acceptance and commitment therapy were performed on the experimental group. Finally, the data is collected and analyzed by SPSS software.
The results of covariance analysis indicated that the treatment method in the experimental group had a significant effect on self-control and self-regulation variables, and the posttest scores of the variables in the in experimental group increased in comparison with the pretest scores.
The results of this research indicate that acceptance and commitment therapy is effective in increasing self-control and self-regulation of adolescents with drug abuse disorder. Due to the importance of weak self-control and self-regulation for addiction, especially in adolescents, using this approach is highly recommended to psychologists, social workers and other therapeutic occupations who are working with adolescents with drug abuse disorder.