The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Group Therapy on Students' Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Self-Regulation

Considering the importance of students' mental health as valuable human resources in the society and the role that psychological flexibility and emotional self-regulation variables play in improving students' mental health, this research aimed to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment based group therapy on cognitive flexibility and emotional self-regulation of students.

This research adopted a quasi-experimental design with pre-test, post-test and a control group. The statistical population included all high school10th grade male students in Tehran in the academic year of 2018-2019, thirty of whom were selected by random cluster sampling and then randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. Dennis and Vander Wal’s (2010) Cognitive Flexibility Inventory and Hoffmann and Kashdan's (2010) Emotional Self-Regulatory Questionnaire were used to collect data in the pre-test and post-test stages. Acceptance and commitment based group therapy was implemented in 8 sessions of 90 minutes in the experimental group, but the control group did not experience the treatment. The collected data were analyzed using the analysis of covariance through SPSS software version 22.

The findings showed that there is a significant difference between the post-test scores of the experimental and the control groups indicating that the therapy group based on acceptance and commitment increased the cognitive flexibility and emotional self-regulation of the experimental group (P<0.05).

Implementation of acceptance and commitment based group therapy can be effective in enhancing students’ cognitive flexibility and emotional self-regulation.