The Effect of Cognitive- Behavioral Art-Play Therapy and Cognitive-Behavioral Story Therapy on Pain Perception and Hope in Children with Cancer

Children with cancer, along with medical treatments, need psychological treatments to overcome their illness and its consequences. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy and cognitive-behavioral story therapy on pain perception and hope in children with cancer.
The current study was quasi-experimental research with pre-post-test and follow-up and control group. The research participants consisted of 36 children with cancer aged 8-12 years old in Amir Hospital, in Shiraz city, who were selected using purposeful sampling method and were randomly assigned to two therapeutic groups and a control group (each group with 12 people). Oucher Pain Scale (OPS-Beyer et al, 1992) and Children’s Hope Scale (CHS- Snyder et al, 1997) was used to measure the dependent variable in pretest, post-test and follow up. The first and second group along with medical treatments received a treatment course on cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy and cognitive-behavioral story therapy in 12 sessions and control group only continued regular medical treatments. The data were analyzed using rank-order repeated measures analysis of variance.
The results revealed that there was a significant difference between cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy and cognitive-behavioral story therapy with control group in pain perception (L=33.005, P <0.001) and hope of children (L=33.67, P <0.001) in post-test and follow-up stages. Also results revealed that there was no significant difference between cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy and cognitive-behavioral story therapy in pain perception, but there was a significant difference between cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy (stronger effect) and cognitive-behavioral story therapy in hope of children.
Cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy has been effective in increase hope and both of cognitive-behavioral art-play therapy and cognitive-behavioral story therapy has been effective in reducing the pain perception of children with cancer. Therefore, we can use these two therapies to improve the hope and decrease pain perception of these children in therapeutic centers.