The Effectiveness of emotional self-regulation trainingon empathy level and school engagement in elementaryschool students with behavioral- emotional problems

Emotional-Behavioral Problems refers to situations in which a person’s emotional and behavioral responses in school are not compatible with age, ethnic, and cultural norms and provide necessary conditions for social maladaptation, poor self-care, and failure in education, as well as mental disorders in adulthood. The present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of emotional self-regulation training on empathy level and school engagement in elementary school students with behavioral- emotional problems.

This research was a quasi-experimental study with pre-test-post-test design and control group. The statistical population of the study included all 10102 female elementary school students in Mako. The statistical sample consisted of 30 students who were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Participants completed the basic empathy questionnaire (BES) and school enthusiasm (SES) questionnaires: pre-test and post-test. The subjects in the experimental group underwent emotional self-regulation training in 8 sessions of 90 minutes and the control group was not exposed to the independent variable. Data analysis was performed using multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS program.

Data analysis showed that emotional self-regulation training led to significant differences between groups in the level of empathy (P <0.001, F = 11.09) and school engagement (P <0.001, F = 12.11).

According to the findings, it can be concluded that emotional self-regulation training is an effective intervention to improve empathy (emotional and cognitive) and school engagement (behavioral, emotional and cognitive) students with emotional-behavioral problems