Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: Depression is one of the most common mental disorders. Regulation of emotions through cognition is one of people's basic needs, which helps them regulate their emotions or feelings in the face of a threatening and stressful event. People's belief that they can express their emotions appropriately, control them, or manage their positive and negative emotions is called self–efficacy in emotional regulation. Therefore, a person's thoughts and cognition play a significant role in the ability to manage. Also, communication skills are essential in improving a person's cognitive, emotional, and practical abilities to interact with others and achieve success and happiness. Human capabilities grow through interpersonal relationships, and the result is poor communication, family, educational, occupational problems, low self–efficacy, and worsening of depression symptoms. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to determine the effectiveness of communication skills training on cognitive regulation of emotions and self–efficacy in people with mild depression.
Methods: The research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design and a control group. The statistical population included people with mild depression living in Tehran City, Iran, in 2020. Of whom, 20 people were selected by the available sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental (10 people) and control (10 people) groups. The inclusion criteria for the subjects in the study included obtaining written consent, being between 20 and 45 years old, and achieving a cut–off score of mild depression (score between 17 and 28) on the Beck depression inventory–II (Beck et al., 1996). The exclusion criteria for the subjects from the study were having a history of participating in life skills training sessions and being absent from two consecutive sessions. The intervention (communication skills training) was conducted in accordance with the World Health Organization's educational guidelines (1994). The expermintal group underwent communication skills training for 8 sessions of 90 minutes, two sessions per week. The control group received no intervention. The study instruments were the Beck Depression Inventory–II (Beck et al., 1996), the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) (Garnefski et al., 2001), and the General Self–Efficacy Scale (Sherer et al., 1982). Data analysis was done using descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (analysis of covariance) in SPSS version 16. The significance level of statistical tests was set at 0. 05.
Results: The results indicated that communication skills training was significantly effective in increasing adaptive cognitive–emotional strategies (p<0.001), reducing maladaptive cognitive–emotional strategies (p=0.005), and increasing self–efficacy (p<0.001) in individuals with mild depression. The effect size of communication skills training intervention on people suffering from depression who were in the experimental group was 45% for rumination strategies (p=0.002), 43% for blaming others (p=0.002), 28% for catastrophizing (p=0.020), and 24% for self–blame (p=0.032). However, they increase as follows: 40% for replanning strategies (p=0.004), 32% for compromise re–evaluation (p=0.012), 29% for renewed attention (p=0.018), 26% for event acceptance (p=0.027), and 25% for perspective taking (p=0.029). Also, the effect size of the communication skills training intervention on the self–efficacy variable in people with mild depression who were trained in the experimental group showed approximately 41% increase in self–efficacy compared to the control group, which was not trained.
Conclusion: Given the importance of communication skills training to people with mild depression and its significant impact on their control of adaptive and maladaptive cognitive emotional strategies and self–efficacy, communication skills training is necessary.