Comparison of the Effectiveness of Effective Communication and Critical Thinking Training on Emotional Self-Regulation and Social Anxiety of Female High School Students in Bojnourd in 2019

Maintaining a healthy and dynamic interpersonal relationship requires learning social skills. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the effectiveness of effective communication training and critical thinking on emotional self-regulation and social anxiety of female high school students in Bojnourd.

The research design was semi-experimental with pre- and post-test. The statistical population of the research included all the female second-period high school students in Bojnourd in the academic year of 2018-2019. 45 students were selected by cluster sampling method and assigned to three groups of 15 people (effective communication, critical thinking, and control). The experimental group participated in 8 sessions (one session per week, 90 minutes each) of communication skills training and 8 sessions (one session per week, 90 minutes each) of critical thinking training. The control group underwent no intervention. The Adolescent Social Sports Questionnaires of LaGerca et al. (1998) and the emotional self-regulation questionnaire of Marschark et al. (2004) were administered before and after the intervention. The design of the present study was pretest-posttest and follow-up with a control group. Data analysis was done by ANCOVA using SPSS software.

The results of data analysis showed that the two methods of teaching effective communication skills and critical thinking training led to significant changes in emotional self-regulation and social anxiety in the post-test stage (p<0.05), and there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of these two educational methods (p> 0.05).

According to the results of the present study, teaching effective communication skills and teaching critical thinking can be recommended as effective ways to increase emotional self-regulation and reduce social anxiety in students with these problems.