The Effectiveness of Positive Psychotherapy on Improving Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies in Male Secondary High School Students with Anxiety Symptoms

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of positive psychotherapy (PPT) on improving cognitive emotion regulation strategies in students with anxiety symptoms. This was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest-follow up design and control group. The sample size of 30 subjects were selected by purposeful sampling method from among 5038 male students of the secondary high schools of Khoy city and were randomly assigned to two experimental (n = 15) and control (n = 15) groups. The participants completed the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) developed by Garnovskii in the pretest, posttest, and follow up stages. Meanwhile, the subjects in the experimental group received PPT trainings during eight 90-minute sessions. Data were analyzed using repeated measuresmultivariate analysis of variance. Data analysis showed that PPT caused an increase in the positive cognitive emotion regulation strategies and a reduction in the cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the post-test and this effect also continued in the follow-up. Based on the results, it can be said that PPT significantly affects the improvement of positive and negative cognitive emotion regulation strategies of students with anxiety symptoms.