Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objectives: Divorce causes many problems for children and increases anhedonia and decreases emotional expression in them. Anhedonia means a decrease in the desire to experience a pleasure. It is one of the main components of depression disorder and reduces the ability or desire of people to participate in enjoyable and lovable activities. Emotional experience means expressing emotion regardless of its value (positive or negative) and method (verbal, physical or facial). The unified protocol for trans diagnostic treatment is one of the effective treatment methods for emotional disorders that occur due to the limitation of cognitive behavioral therapies in the treatment of some disorders. Unified trans diagnostic treatment emphasizes the role of emotional regulation as the main cognitive and behavioral processes in emotional disorders and has an effective role in improving psychological characteristics, especially emotion–related characteristics. Therefore, this research aimed to determine the effectiveness of a unified protocol for trans diagnostic treatment of anhedonia and emotional expression in the children of divorce living in Bandar Abbas City, Iran.
Methods: This research is a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest design with a control group. The research population was children of divorce referring to the psychological service clinics of Bandar Abbas City in 2019. The sample size was calculated at 34 children, which were selected by the available sampling method and randomly divided into two equal groups of experimental and control. The inclusion criteria of divorced children in the study included being 13 to 18 years of age, at least six and at most twelve months passed after formal parental divorce, living with one parent, no history of receiving psychological treatment, absence of other psychological disorders at the same time and not taking psychiatric medication. The exclusion criteria were cancellation of study continuation and absence of more than one session from the intervention. The experimental group underwent the unified protocol for trans diagnostic treatment for ten 70–min sessions (one session per week), and the control group did not receive any training. The research instruments in the pretest and posttest for two groups were Anhedonia Scale (Snaith et al., 1995) and the Emotional Expression Questionnaire (King & Emmons, 1990). To analyze the data, we used descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage) and inferential statistics (the Chi–square test to compare variables of gender, age, length of time since parental divorce and living status with the parent, and multivariate analysis of covariance) in software SPSS version 19. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.
Results: The results showed that after eliminating the effect of pretest scores, the unified protocol for trans diagnostic treatment significantly changed both variables of anhedonia (p<0.001) and emotional expression (p<0.001) in the posttest in the children of divorce in the experimental group compared to the control group. In addition, based on the effect size, 64% of the changes in anhedonia and 69% of the changes in emotional expression were due to the trans diagnostic treatment.  
Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, the unified protocol for trans diagnostic treatment is effective in reducing anhedonia and increasing emotional expression in children of divorce. As a result, therapists and health professionals can use the trans diagnostic treatment to improve emotional characteristics, especially to reduce anhedonia and increase emotional expression.