The Effect of Mindfulness-based Intervention on Improving the Level of Cognitive Regulation of Children’s Emotions

Description

Page: 298-305

Sara Rahiminejad¹, Parviz Azadfallah², Saeed Ghanbari³ (Department of Psychology, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran¹,² and Department of Psychology, Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran³)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of mindfulness-based intervention on emotional regulation of 8- to 12-year-old students. The research method in this study; is a semi-experimental type of pre-test and post-test with a control group. The statistical population included all students (boys & girls) aged 8 to 12 years old in schools in district 3 of Tehran. Among these, 36 people were selected non-randomly and available; And they were replaced in two experimental (18 people) and control (18 people) groups. First, the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire of (Granofsky, Kraij, & Spinhaven, 2002). Was administered to both groups (pre-test). Then the subjects of the experimental group received the mindfulness training program once a week for 90 minutes during 12 sessions, while the control group did not receive any educational intervention. After this stage, both groups were evaluated again with the questionnaire (post-test). The collected data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) in SPSS version 22 software. The analysis of the findings from the multivariate covariance analysis (MANCOVA) showed that the implementation of mindfulness training has a significant effect in reducing the negative components of emotion regulation and increasing the positive components of emotion regulation at the level of p<0.01. Mindfulness exercises have improved the level of cognitive regulation of emotions by increasing children’s awareness of thoughts, feelings, and bodily senses, accepting them, describing events, and not judging them.