The effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy on academic procrastination and cognitive-emotional regulation of first-grade high school students in Mashhad

Procrastination is one of the important issues in the field of planning, education, and academic achievement. Another issue is emotional cognitive regulation, which plays a key role in normal and abnormal educational processes. Psychotherapy techniques can be effective in reducing these disorders. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy on academic procrastination and students' emotional cognitive regulation.It was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study with a control group. The statistical population included 40 first-grade high school students in Mashhad who were selected by available sampling and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. In the experimental group, compassion-focused treatment was performed in 10 sessions of 90 minutes. The Garnefsky Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire and the Procrastination-Student Assessment Scale (PASS) were used. Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance and SPSS 21 software.There was a significant difference between the mean scores of procrastination and emotional regulation variables in the experimental and control groups (p <0.05). The effect of this treatment on reducing procrastination was 82% and the increasing emotional regulation score was 51%.Compassion-focused therapy can reduce procrastination and increase students' cognitive regulation. Therefore, it is suggested that this intervention be used in educational planning.