Effectiveness of positive psychological intervention on reducing difficulties in emotion regulation in adolescents with eating disorders symptoms

Eating disorders are one of the most common psychosomatic disorders that leads to many problems in physical, emotional health and mental functioning. But the main issue is that does positive psychological intervention is effective on reducing difficulties in emotion regulation in adolescents with eating disorders symptoms?

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of positive psychological intervention on reducing difficulties in emotion regulation in adolescents with eating disorders symptoms.

The present study was a semi-experimental studies with pretest-posttest design and control group. The statistical population includes all female students studying at secondary schools in urmia to number of 4276 peoples in the 2018-2019 academic year. From this population, a sample of 30 people was selected through targeted sampling and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. participants completed in the pre-test and post-test stages of Gratz & Roemer (2004) difficult in emotion regulation  and  In the meantime, the subjects in the experimental group were trained positive psychotherapy (Seligman et al., 2006) by the researcher in 8 sessions of 90 minutes a week for 1 session. Data analysis was performed using covariance analysis.    

The findings showed that positive psychological intervention reduced the mean scores of the experimental group on difficulties in emotion regulation and its components including lack of acceptance of emotional responses, difficulty in goal-directed behavior, difficulty in controlling impulse, lack of emotional awareness, Limited access to strategies and lack of emotional clarity compared to the control group (p<0/05).

Therefore, it can be argued that positive psychological intervention is an effective treatment for improving emotion regulation problems in adolescents with symptoms of eating disorder.