Relationship between Cognitive-emotional Regulation and Resiliency in Families with Children with Special Needs: Investigating the Role of Mindfulness as a Mediator

Parents of children with special needs require highly adaptive and supportive patterns due to the problems they face because of their children. The purpose of this study was examining the relationship between cognitive-emotional regulation and resiliency in families who have exceptional children with mindfulness playing the role of mediator. This study was correlational. The participants were 264 students' parents (105 boys and 159 girls) who were selected via cluster random sampling from different schools. The research instruments were family resiliency scale (Sikbi, 2005), cognitive emotional scale (Garanfski, 2001), and mindfulness scale (Baer, 2006). Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (SPSS) version 21 was used to analyze the data. Results of this study showed that cognitive emotional regulation could predict resiliency. Moreover, there was a significantly positive correlation between cognitive emotional regulation at and(r= 0.36, p<0.01 and resiliency. Additionally, a significant correlation was found between resiliency and mindfulness (r=0.42, p<0.01). Moreover, it was found that the negative predictors of resiliency were as follows: emotion regulation, self- blaming, making disasters, blaming others, adopting views and obsessing the mind negatively. The positive predictors of resiliency were as follows: acceptance, reconcentration on the planning and positive revaluation. Resiliency can explain 18 percent of cognitive regulation variance. Together resiliency and mindfulness can predict 26 percent of variance on the same scale. Thus, entering mindfulness into the regression equation increased coefficient of determination by 8%. It is concluded that cognitive emotional regulation could predict resiliency. Furthermore, mindfulness is not essential as mediator variable for the perception of relation between cognitive regulation and resiliency.