Theory of mind teaching on the social competencies and restraint in children of Down syndrome

The deficiencies in social adequacy and self–esteem skills in Down's syndrome children have prevented them from having adequate behaviors in social situations and lacking interpersonal interactions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching the theory of mind on the social adequacy and self–sufficiency of Down syndrome in the first and second elementary schools of Yazd in the academic year 2017–2018.

This is a semi–experimental design with pretest–posttest design with control group. The statistical population of all children was Down syndrome in Yazd city, in which 24 children with Down syndrome were selected by available sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (each group was 12). The social skills questionnaire (Gersham and Elliott, 1990), using social competency tests (Prandin, 2006) and the subscale of self–restraint of social skills questionnaire (Gersham and Elliott, 1990), were assessed in both pretest and posttest. Twelve sessions of mind theory training were conducted for the experimental group. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation) and inferential (covariance analysis) by SPSS21 software.

The results showed that training of mind theory had a significant effect on social adequacy (p<0.001) and restraint (p<0.001) in children of experimental group.

According to the results, teaching the theory of mind improves the social adequacy and self–control of children with Down syndrome.