The Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation training in Improving Social Skills of Elementary School Students with Oppositional Defiant Disorder

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of emotion regulation training on the social skills of elementary school students with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. This study was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design and a control group. The study population in this study included all female elementary school students (945 subjects) aged 10-12 years in Malekan who were educating in the 2019-2020 academic year. The sample investigated in this study includes 30 female elementary school students with Oppositional Defiant Disorder in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades of elementary school, aged 10-12 years, who were selected through a purposive sampling method and randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group (15 experimental subjects, 15 control subjects) who were assigned. The Child Symptom Inventory-4 (CSI-4) by Spirafkin and Gado (1994) and the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) by Gersham and Elliott (1990) were used to collect data. The experimental group received emotion regulation training (8 one-hour sessions), and the control group received no intervention during this period. Data were analyzed using Covariance analysis. The results showed that emotion regulation training had an effect on all components of social skills including cooperation (P<0.005), assertiveness (P<0.001), and self-control (P<0.003) of elementary school girls with defiant disorder. Based on the obtained results, it is suggested that emotion regulation training should be considered as one of the effective methods to improve social skills of students with oppositional defiant disorder.