The Effect of Painting Therapy on Reducing Signs of Symptoms in Separation Anxiety Disorder in Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of painting therapeutic in reducing the symptoms in separation anxiety disorder in pre-school children. The research method was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest with the control group. One hundred twenty-one mothers of children in these centers were selected by the available sampling method, and through them, their child separation anxiety was assessed. According to the criteria for entry and exit, 26 were selected and randomly divided into two groups. Control assigned. The children of the experimental group received two painting sessions during the ten courses of 45 minutes per week; the control group was placed on the waiting list. For data gathering, the questionnaire was used to diagnose children's symptoms of Gadu and Sprafkhin (1994) and Canaries's (1991) behavioral rating scale. One-way variance analysis was used to analyze the data. The results of data analysis showed that there is a significant difference between the mean scores of the post-test and the separation anxiety between the two experimental and control groups, after which the effect of pre-test was adjusted. Therapeutic painting reduces the level of separation anxiety symptoms in the experimental group. Therefore, in clinical situations and the treatment of child anxiety disorder, the results of painting therapy can be used as a beneficial non-therapeutic treatment.