Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: An aging population is one of the most critical challenges that Iran will face in the coming years. The elderly face many problems, one of which is declining health. Tenacity is a personality trait that acts as a source of coping in the face of stressful, tense, and challenging events. Another problem for older people is a decrease in self–compassion. This structure is an important motivational force that includes kindness, fair judgment, human commonalities, awareness, and a sense of connectedness. It also increases life expectancy and finding meaning in life. There are various training methods to improve psychological characteristics, including positive mindfulness training methods. Positive education with a purposeful and intelligent focus on human strength and virtues in wisdom, courage, justice, moderation, prosperity, and humanity seeks to overcome all threats to human health. Therefore, the current research was conducted to determine the effectiveness of positive mindfulness training on older people's health hardiness, and self–compassion.
Methods: This research used a quasi–experimental method with a pretest–posttest design and a control group. The statistical population of this research comprised all elderly residents of nursing homes in the fifth district of Tehran City, Iran, in 2022. From this population, 50 qualified volunteers were included in the study by purposeful sampling and were randomly divided into two groups (25 people) as test and control. The independent variable in this research was positive mindfulness training, and the dependent variables were health tenacity and self–compassion for older adults. The inclusion criteria were as follows: informed consent to participate in the research, age above 65 years, minimum education, no addiction and use of psychiatric drugs according to the clinical interview, and no history of receiving psychological services at the same time or in the last three months. Also, the exclusion criteria included refusal to continue cooperation and absence of more than two sessions. To comply with the ethical principles of the research, treatment sessions were held for the people of the control group after the research. They were also assured of the confidentiality of the information in the research samples. First, research questionnaires were completed for both groups (experimental and control) in the pretest. Then, the positive mindfulness protocol was performed in eight 90–minute sessions for the experimental group. For the control group, no intervention was applied. Immediately after the completion of the intervention, a posttest was performed for the experimental and control groups. The research tools in the pretest and posttest for both groups were the Revised Health Hardiness Inventory (Gibhardt et al., 2001) and the Self–compassion Scale (Neff, 2003). The research findings were analyzed using covariance analysis in SPSS version 19 software. The significance level of the tests was set at 0.05.
Results: The results showed that after removing the pretest effect, there was a significant difference in the variables of health hardiness and self–compassion between the experimental and control groups in the posttest (p<0.001). Based on the results of the eta square, 0.297 of the changes in health hardiness and 0.609 of the changes in self–compassion of older people were due to the effect of positive mindfulness training.
Conclusion: According to the study results, positive mindfulness training is useful for older adults and effectively increases their health hardiness and self–compassion. So, psychologists and counselors can use positive mindfulness training for older people, which can be used as a psychological intervention and other interventions.