The Effectiveness of Assertiveness Training Program on the Resilience and Clinical Symptoms of Students with Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder has many negative consequences, including reduced resilience. Therefore, the aim of this research was the effectiveness of assertiveness training program on the resilience and clinical symptoms of students with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.

This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was semi-experimental with a pretest and posttest design with a control group. The research population was male students aged 16 to 18 in the second-high school of Karaj city in the 2019-20 academic years, which from them number of 50 people of them were selected by multi-stage random sampling method and randomly replaced in two groups of 25 including experimental and control groups. The experimental group underwent 8 sessions of 60 minutes under the assertiveness training program and during this time the control group did not receive any training. The data were collected with the resilience scale (Connor and Davidson, 2003) and generalized anxiety disorder questionnaire (Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams and Lowe, 2006) and analyzed by multivariate covariance analysis in SPSS version 24 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups have significantly different in terms of the variables of resilience and clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder. In the other words, the assertiveness training program led to increase resilience (F-41.25, P<0.001) and reduce clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (F-28.34, P<0.001) in students.

The results indicated the effectiveness of the assertiveness training program on resilience and clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder. Therefore, counselors and therapists can use the assertiveness training program along with other training methods and programs to increase resilience and reduce the clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.