Effectiveness of Group Narrative Therapy on Psychological Wellbeing and Cognitive Emotion Regulation of Mothers of Children with Hearing Impairment

The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of group narrative therapy on the psychological well-being and cognitive emotion regulation of mothers of children with hearing impairment. The present paper is a quasi-experimental study with a pretest, posttest, and control group design and a two-month follow-up period. The statistical population of the present study included 96 mothers of hearing impaired children referred to training centers for hearing impaired children in 2018–19 in Shahrekord City. 40 mothers were selected by voluntary sampling method and randomly divided into experimental and control groups (each group consisted of 20 mothers). Three mothers from the experimental group and two mothers from the control group withdrew their participation in the study after the intervention began. The experimental group received twelve ninety-minute sessions of the Training Narrative Therapy intervention (Lopez et al., 2014) over three months. The questionnaires used in this study included Psychological Well-Being Questionnaire (Ryff, 1996) and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garenfski et al., 2001). Data from the study were analyzed using repeated measures method ANOVA. The results showed that group narrative therapy had a significant effect on the psychological well-being and cognitive emotion regulation of the mothers of hearing-impaired children (p 0.001),  such that this therapy led to an improvement in psychological well-being and positive cognitive emotion regulation and a decrease in negative cognitive emotion regulation in the mothers of hearing-impaired children. The results of the present study show that narrative therapy can be used as an efficient therapy to improve the psychological well-being and cognitive emotion regulation of the mothers of hearing-impaired children by using techniques such as externalizing the problem, examining major life challenges, and determining negative and positive factors in the life process.