Comparing the Effectiveness of Mindfulness Training and Compassion Therapy on Dark Personality Traits and Psychological Adaptation in Socially Disadvantaged Girls

 Socially disadvantaged people have many psychological problems, especially in the field of increasing dark personality traits and decreasing psychological adjustment. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of comparing the effectiveness of mindfulness training and compassion therapy on dark personality traits and psychological adaptation in socially disadvantaged girls.

This research in terms of purpose was practical and in terms of implementation, method was semi-experimental with a pretest, posttest and one-month follow-up design with a control group. The research population was socially disadvantaged teenage girls in health homes under the supervision of the welfare organization of North Khorasan province in the second half of 2021 year. The research sample was considered 45 people who were selected by available sampling method and were replaced by simple random method in three equal groups including two experimental groups and one control group. Each of the experimental groups received 8 sessions of 60 minutes (one session per week) separately with methods of mindfulness training and compassion therapy, and the control group did not receive any training during this period. The research tools were dark personality traits questionnaire (Jonason and Webster, 2010) and psychological adaptation scale (Biesecker et al., 2013) and the data obtained from their implementation were analyzed by analysis variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS software.

The findings showed that both methods of mindfulness training and compassion therapy in compared to the control group caused a significant decrease in dark personality traits (and its three components including narcissism, machiavellism and psychopathy) and a significant increase in psychological adaptation (and its three components including experience, deliberation and social integration) in the posttest and one month follow-up stages in socially disadvantaged girls (P<0.001). Other findings showed that there was no significant difference between the two methods of mindfulness training and compassion therapy in reducing dark personality traits and psychological adaptation and the components of each of them in the posttest and one month follow-up stages in socially disadvantaged girls (P>0.05).

According to the results of this study, health professionals and therapists can use both mindfulness training and compassion therapy methods in their psychological interventions to improve health-related characteristics, including reducing dark personality traits and increasing psychological adaptation.