The effectiveness of social-emotional skills training on self-regulation and emotion recognition of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of social-emotional skills training on self-regulation and emotional recognition of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The research method was semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test design and a control group. The statistical population included all male students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the fifth and sixth grades of Tehran in the academic year of 2020-2021. The sample size of the research included 30 male children who were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to two groups (15 people in each group). The research tool included the self-regulation questionnaire (SRQ) of Bouffard et al. (1995) and the Facial Affect Recognition Task (FART) of Ekman (1976). The control group did not receive any intervention, but the research experimental group received social-emotional skills intervention during 12 sessions. Multivariate covariance analysis was used to analyze the data. The findings showed that with pre-test control, there was a significant difference between the post-test average of cognitive self-regulation, meta-cognitive self-regulation, and emotion recognition in the two experimental and control groups at the level of 0.01. The results showed that social-emotional skill training is probably an effective treatment for self-regulation and emotion recognition in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.