Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Self-Concept and Emotion Regulation in Children with Learning Disabilities

Learning disability is among the problems which have long been attended to by the specialists and child psychologists. Despite having normal intelligence, children with learning disorders cannot have appropriate educational promotion in reading, writing, and mathematics. This process not only damages their educational performance, but it also influences their psychological processes and causes them to have lower self-concept and self-esteem and vulnerable emotional regulation. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on self-concept and emotional regulation of children with learning disability.

It was a quasi-experimental research with pretest- posttest control group design. The study population of the present study included all primary students with learning disability who referred to consultation centers in Isfahan in the academic year 2017-2018. A sample of 30 children from them was selected through purposeful sampling and assigned either to the experimental or control group. The instruments used in the present study included Learning Problems Questionnaire (Wilcot, et al, 2011), Emotion Cognitive Regulation Strategies (Garenfski, et.al, 2002) and Children’s Self-concept (Piers-Harris, 1969). The experimental group received the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in nine sixty-minute training sessions during two months. The data were analyzed through ANCOVA via SPSS23 software.

The results showed that ACT has had significant effect on self-concept (F=13.77, P<0.0001), positive emotional regulation (F=154.65, P<0.0001) and negative emotional regulation (F=105.17, P<0.0001) in the children with learning disability. It means that ACT had led to the improvement of self-concept and positive emotional regulation of the children with learning disability and decreased their negative emotional regulation.

According to the findings of the present study, it can be said that ACT can be applied as an efficient method to improve self-concept and emotional regulation of children with learning disability through making values clear and psychological flexibility. Furthermore, ACT improves other cognitive and emotional processes such emotional regulation in children with learning disabilities.