Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objectives:  The most common childhood disorders are Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. This disorder is characterized by various traumas for the individual during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, such as emotional problems such as anxiety and depression, interpersonal problems, addiction, educational and occupational problems. The main feature of this disorder is a steady decrease in attention and an increase in impulsivity. This disorder needs attention due to its importance. This disorder is associated with characteristics such as lack of perseverance, distraction, difficulty concentrating, irregularity, and impulsive actions and decisions. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most common childhood disorders that causes people to go to medical centers more than other disorders. Today, this disorder causes significant problems for many students for a variety of reasons, affecting their family, emotional, social, cognitive function, and then, as adults, their occupational and marital performance. Because many of these children receive medication and report significant side effects, the spread of non-pharmacological methods is important, and parents as well as children often prefer alternative therapies. . The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral play therapy on executive functions, behavior control and emotion management in students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test design with a control and follow-up group. The statistical population of the study included all elementary school students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the 98-99 academic year who referred to counseling centers. Twenty-four qualified volunteers were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (each group consisted of 12 people). Groups Emotion Management Skills Questionnaire (Seiman et al., 2001) which shows the psychometric properties of Cronbach's alpha between 0.62 and 0.77. The reliability of the retest for 6 scales is also between 0.61 and 0.8. Executive functions (Barclay, 2001) that the total validity of this scale with Cronbach's alpha is 0.99 and subscales 0.74 to 0.83 by Barclay and self-control (Humphrey, 1982) that the reliability of this test, using The retest correlation method was calculated at intervals of 2 to 3 weeks and the total correlation score was calculated in the range of 0.53 to 0.71. Completed. Cognitive-behavioral play therapy was performed in 10 90-minute sessions based on the Nell (2019) training package. Analysis of variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc test was used in SPSS software version 22. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.
Results: The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that play-cognitive-behavioral therapy intervention in improving executive functions (p <0.001), behavior control (p <0.001) and emotion management (p <0.001). Students with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder are effective. Also, there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the variables of executive function defects (p = 0.002), behavior control and emotion management in three stages of pre-test and post-test measurement and follow-up (p <0.001). It was also shown that the effectiveness of play, cognitive-behavioral therapy in the follow-up phase was stable for the variables of executive function defects (p = 0.063) and behavior control (p = 1).
Conclusion: Based on the findings of this study, it can be said that cognitive-behavioral play therapy is effective in improving executive functions, behavior control and emotion management of students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.