The effectiveness of social-cognitive problem solving skills on improvement of the interpersonal relationships and empathy of students with learning disabilities

Students with learning disability have difficulties in reading, writing or computing that confront them with poor social skills and deficient interpersonal relations. Such difficulties also lower the students’ physical and psychological wellbeing and challenge them with emotion-regulation deficiency plus personal maladjustment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of training social-cognitive problem solving on the quality of interpersonal relationships and empathy of the students with learning disabilities. This is an empirical study in pre-test and post-test design which was accompanied by a control group. The population consisted of all students with learning disabilities from Gonabad who were 12 to 16 years old in the academic year of 2012. The subjects were 40 male students selected from students with learning disabilities. Next, they were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Interpersonal relationships and empathy scale for data collection were used. Findings of Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) showed that training of social-cognitive problem solving skills proved useful for improvement of social relations and personal empathy in students with learning disabilities (P<0/001). Because students with learning disabilities feel less empathy than normal students and experience depression and loneliness in addition to academic problems, training interventions can improve interpersonal relationships of theirs.