The effect of group play therapy on impulsive behaviors, social adjustment and subjective well-being of preschool students

The aim of present study was determine the effect of group play therapy on impulsive behaviors, social adjustment and subjective well-being. This research was semi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The research population was preschool students of Mashhad city in 2019-20 academic years, which from them 40 people were selected by purposeful sampling method and randomly replaced into two groups. The experimental group received group play therapy for 12 sessions of 45 minutes and the control group didn’t training. To collected data used from the tools of impulsive behaviors scale (Barratt, 1994), social adjustment subscale (Bell, 1961) and subjective well-being questionnaire (Keyes & Magyar-Moe, 2003), which completed by mothers. Data were analyzed by independent t-test and multivariate analysis of covariance method in SPSS-19 software. The Findings showed that in the pre-test stage there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of impulsive behaviors, social adjustment and subjective well-being (P>0/05), but in the post-test stage there was significant difference in terms of all three variables (P<0/05). In the other words, group play therapy led to decrease impulsive behaviors and increase social adjustment and subjective well-being of preschool students (P<0/001). Based on the results it is suggest that clinical psychologists and therapists used from group play therapy along with other therapies to improve health and especially decrease impulsive behaviors and increase social adjustment and subjective well-being of preschool students.