Study of the effectiveness of schema therapy on coping styles and cognitive emotion regulation strategies in Students

The experience of mourning leads to many emotions in people. As a result, learning emotion regulation strategies affects the experience of bereavement in bereaved people and is a kind of moderator of the experience of bereavement. People use strategies called emotion regulation to change emotional triggers, situations of emotional experience, amount and intensity, duration and way of experiencing emotion internally or externally. In the cognitive strategies of emotion regulation, the focus is on thoughts and cognition in anxiety management. Using emotion regulation strategies in any form and manner has an important role in all periods of life. Effective emotion regulation strategies are related to high self-confidence, positive emotions, how to deal with various types of stress and more constructive social and personal interactions. People with the ability to regulate emotions are able to control their impulses, feeling sad and hopeless, anxiety, adapting to problems and accepting themselves and the conditions, which leads to reducing psychological damage in them. Therefore, strengthening and learning these strategies in people, especially teenagers, is effective and one of the necessary skills to manage the bereavement experience. Considering the importance of variables of coping styles and cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the experience of normal bereavement and exit from the experience of abnormal bereavement, it is necessary and necessary to use appropriate therapeutic approaches to promote them. One of the therapeutic approaches that has received much attention in recent years is schema therapy. In cognitive psychology, schema is defined as an organized pattern of thinking and behavior and as a mental framework of pre-formed ideas. In the form of a schema, a person perceives the world and the world around him and organizes his new information. These strongly affect our thoughts and emotions, and if they are ineffective, they can cause emotional problems. In schema therapy, attempts are made to adjust these schemas using various experimental, behavioral and cognitive techniques to reduce the invocation of incompatible emotions. Some researchers say that in abnormal grief as a chronic problem and coexisting with other disorders, one should focus on schemas and consider targeting schemas as an effective factor in treatment. Schema therapy is designed as a cognitive-behavioral therapy targeting maladaptive schemas with the aim of treating long-lasting and chronic disorders. Therefore, it can be effective as an efficient method to help experience normal mourning and go through the natural period of mourning. The review of these studies shows that despite the importance of the role of dysfunctional schemas in abnormal grief and ineffective emotional regulation strategies, these two therapeutic methods have been used very little with the aim of intervention in abnormal grief, and these interventions have been very few in relation to abnormal grief in adolescents. Is. In addition to this, there was no research on intervention in abnormal grief caused by Corona, and the researches were only limited to investigating the symptoms of grief caused by Corona, screening tools in this regard, and people's lived experiences in this regard. Therefore, applying schema therapy and checking its effectiveness can be a way to find the most effective treatment methods for teenagers with bereavement caused by Corona. Meanwhile, few studies have investigated this method of treatment for grief, especially grief caused by corona in teenagers. Based on this, the question of the current research is whether schema therapy is effective on coping styles and cognitive emotion regulation strategies of students with abnormal grief caused by Corona?

In this research, the statistical population was first and second high school students with grief disorder caused by Corona in Yazd city in 2021 and 2022. The sample included 30 people (15 people in the experimental group with schema therapy method, 15 people in the control group) who were selected purposefully. The tools of the current research included the stress coping strategies questionnaire (Andler and Parker, 1999) and the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (Granfsky and Kraich, 2001). Schema therapy intervention based on Yang's schema therapy was implemented in 10 consecutive one-hour sessions on the experimental group. No intervention was done on the control group. Multivariate covariance analysis was used to analyze the data.

The findings showed that schema therapy was effective on positive and negative emotional regulation strategies and emotion-oriented and avoidant coping style in the sample group.

According to the present finding, it is necessary to use this treatment method to reduce the injuries and symptoms of abnormal grief by focusing on emotional regulation strategies and coping style of people. One of the limitations of the present study is that only the effectiveness of schema therapy in teenagers with abnormal grief caused by Corona has been investigated, and its generalization to other societies should be done with caution. Also, there is no exact assurance of the absence of coexistence with other disorders, which also affects the generalizability. Researches with a follow-up period can provide more complete findings related to the effectiveness of schema therapy.