The Effect of Educational Intervention of Positive Thinking on the Corona Disease Anxiety, Self-efficacy and Cognitive Regulation of Emotion among Retired Women

The occurrence of psychological disorders and anxiety following epidemic conditions is one of the psychological complications of the Covid-19 crisis. It is important to diagnose the state of mental health and the incidence of psychological disorders in the group of retirees during the covid-19 epidemic.

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of educational intervention of positive thinking on corona disease anxiety, self-efficacy, and cognitive regulation of emotion in retired women between 50 and 75 years old in Swadkoh city.

The research method was semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The statistical population included retired women from Alborz Central in 2022 in Mazandaran province. Among these women, 30 people who had more anxiety were selected by purposeful sampling and were randomly assigned to the experimental group (15 people) and the control group (15 people). Corona disease anxiety scales (Alipur, 2018), cognitive regulation of emotion questionnaire (Garnefsky,  Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2002), and general self-efficacy scale (Schweitzer & Jerusalem, 1979) were used to collect data. Two methods of descriptive and inferential statistics were used in data analysis with SPSS23 software. The intervention method of the research was carried out in the form of teaching positive thinking skills by the researcher during 10 sessions of 1.5 hours for 10 consecutive weeks (twice a week). The educational content used in the research was selected based on the book Positive Thinking and Applied Positivism (Quilliam, 2007) and the book The Optimistic Child by (Seligman et al, 2006), and the educational program was planned based on it.

The results showed that 98.2% of the corona disease anxiety And 99.3% of self-efficacy changes and 98.9% of cognitive regulation of emotion changes were obtained from educational intervention of positive thinking.

The results showed that according to the significance level related to the pre-test and post-test periods, all the significance levels were less than 5%, so we can claim with 95% confidence that positive thinking training is effective in reducing the anxiety of the Corona period and self-efficacy and cognitive regulation of emotion in the retirees' women.