Efficacy of cognitive rehabilitation therapy on stress and anxiety of the high school second level female students

Anxiety and stress degraded the cognitive function of tasks involved in working memory and decreased working memory capacity and efficiency. Working memory is a complex, limited-capacity cognitive system that prepares information to be stored while processing it simultaneously. One of the new therapeutic approaches whose effectiveness in the reduction of stress and anxiety might be considered is cognitive rehabilitation; the efforts to repair cognitive deficits.This study is designed to evaluate the efficacy of cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT) on stress and anxiety of the high school second lever female students in Tehran.

The following study is a semi-experimental study with pretest- posttest and control group with a follow-up stage. The target society of this research includes female students with symptoms of anxiety and stress at the second level of high school in Tehran during the academic year of 2018-2019. The participants are 30 female students in two matched groups (15 participants within the experimental group and 15 ones in the control group) selected by the available sampling method. The experimental group received eight sessions of 90 minutes of individual CRT intervention using computer-based cognitive rehabilitation software. The control group did not have any type of intervention and recruited from the waiting list. The measurement instrument was the depression anxiety and stress scale (DASS) distributed in three different periods of time (pretest, posttest, and follow-up stages. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS-22. Indicators such as mean and standard deviation and multivariate analysis of covariance were used. The Levin test helped us to check the homogeneity of variances.

The results indicated that the CRT method of intervention effectively reduced the high school second level female students’ stress and anxiety. However, just its effect on anxiety remained persistent untill the follow-up period.

CRT method effectively affects the anxiety and stress of high school second level female student, and it might be considered as a useful way in the field.