Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Skills Training on Academic Procrastination and Cognitive Flexibility among Students with Internet Addiction

Internet dependency has dangerous consequences and is increasing at an alarming rate throughout the world, especially in children and adolescents. The current research has aimed at investigating the effectiveness of emotion regulation skills training on academic procrastination and cognitive flexibility among students with internet addiction.

This was a semi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design and a control group. The statistical population included all students with internet addiction in the 1st grade of secondary school in region 2 Rasht in the academic year of 2019-2020.  A total of 36 individuals were selected by available sampling methods and were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (18 individuals in each group). To collect data, the internet addiction test (Young, 1998), the academic procrastination scale (Solomon and Ruthblum, 1984), and the cognitive flexibility inventory (Dennis and Vander Wal, 2010) were used. Emotion regulation training was conducted during 12 sessions in experimental group while the control group did not receive any training. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance and SPSS-23 software.

The results showed that mean scores of academic procrastination and cognitive flexibility, after emotion regulation training, were significantly different in experimental and control groups (P<0/01). In other words, emotion regulation training increases the mean score of cognitive flexibility and decreases the mean score of academic procrastination in the experimental group compared to the control group.

According to the results of the present study, emotion regulation skills training can be used as an effective intervention on the academic procrastination and cognitive flexibility among Students with internet addiction.