The effectiveness of child-centered play therapy on the emotional and social skills of children with autistic disorders

The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Child Centered Group Play Therapy on the emotional and social skills of children with autism disorders. The statistical population of the study consisted of 10 children aged 6 to 8 years with autism disorder who were selected by available sampling method and assigned into experimental (n=5) and control groups (n = 5). It was a pretest-posttest semi-experimental study and the study tools were Zimerman Emotion Management Skill Questionnaire and Elliot & Gersham Social Skills Questionnaire. After the implementation of the pretest, the intervention (child-centered therapy game) was performed for the experimental group and then the posttest was performed. Multivariate covariance analysis showed that Child Centered Play Therapy significantly increased the emotional and social skills in the experimental group compared with the control group (p<0.001). According to the results, child-centered therapeutic games improve the emotional skills of children with autism and is useful in teaching emotional and social skills to autistic children. Therefore, it is suggested that health care administrators pay attention to this matter.