Effectiveness of positivist psychotherapy on irrational beliefs and psychological hardiness in gifted students

Present study was conducted aiming to investigate the effectiveness of positivist psychotherapy on irrational beliefs and psychological hardiness in gifted students. it was an experimental study with pretest, posttest, control group and six-month follow-up. The statistical population of the present study was secondary high school gifted male students in the city of Shahrekord in academic year 2017-18. The sample under study included 40 gifted students who were selected through simple random sampling method and randomly replaced into experimental and control groups (20 in each group). The experimental group received ten sessions of therapy interventions of positivist psychotherapy during two months while the control group didn’t receive any intervention in the study. The applied instruments included irrational beliefs questionnaire (Jones, 1969) and psychological hardiness scale (Kobasa, 1990). The data taken from the study were analyzed through repeated measurement ANOVA. The results showed that positivist psychotherapy has been effective on the decrease of irrational beliefs and increase of psychological hardiness in secondary high school gifted male students. This effect was stable during six-month follow-up. Considering the results of present study, positivist psychotherapy can be applied as a suitable method to decrease irrational beliefs and improve psychological hardiness in the gifted students.