The effectiveness of stress immunization training on the sense of agency, emotion regulation, the tendency to masturbate and Internet pornography in male 12th grade upper secondary school students in Ahvaz

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of stress immunization training on the sense of agency, emotion regulation, tendency to masturbate, and online pornography in male 12th grade upper secondary school students in Ahvaz. This study was a quasi-experimental one with a pre-test, post-test, and control group. The statistical population of this study included all male 12th grade upper secondary school students in Ahvaz in the academic year 2020-2021. Among them, 50 male students of the 12th grade of upper secondary school were selected using multistage cluster sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental group and the control group (25 people in each group). The experimental group underwent Meichenbaum’s (2008) stress immunization training in 8 sessions of 90 minutes and the control group received no intervention. The instruments used included Sense of Agency Scale (Polito et al., 2013), the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ-short) (Garnefski et al., 2002), Masturbation Tendency Questionnaire (Jozak, 2017), and the Pornography Craving Questionnaire (Kraus & Rosenberg, 2014). Data were analyzed using Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS-23 software. The results of data analysis showed that stress immunization training had a positive effect on sense of agency, emotion regulation, tendency to masturbate, and Internet pornography in male students compared to the control group (P <0.001). The results in the follow-up phase were also stable. The results indicated the effectiveness of stress immunization training on the sense of agency, emotion regulation, the tendency to masturbate, and Internet pornography in male 12th grade upper secondary school students