Evaluating the Effectiveness of Group Therapy Education Based on Acceptance and Commitment on Psychological Flexibility and Alexithymia of Mothers of Children With Special Learning Disabilities

Parents with a child with special learning disabilities (LDs) face many challenges regarding their developmental process. Studies show that mothers in such families experience high levels of stress, anxiety, isolation, and uncertainty that can cause psychological distress. Alexithymia is a factor that increases the psychological distress of parents in these families. Alexithymia is a personal trait associated with an inability to express emotions, moods, or mood swings. One of the critical variables involved in people's mental and emotional health is psychological flexibility, which is defined as the ability to change the cognitive set to adapt to environmental changes. Psychological flexibility enables people to stay in a situation when experiencing anxiety to eliminate it. One of the treatments that can be used for mothers with children with LDs is acceptance and commitment therapy. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group training based on acceptance and commitment therapy on the psychological flexibility and alexithymia of mothers with children suffering from special LD.

The research method was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The study's statistical population includes mothers of all children with special LDs living in Tehran City, Iran in 2019. Thirty eligible volunteer mothers were selected by convenience sampling from individuals who had been referred to LDs centers. They were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Acceptance and commitment therapy was performed in 10 sessions of 45 minutes, one session a week in group form for the experimental group. The study data were collected via Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (Dennis and Vander Wal, 2010) and Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby et al., 1994). The research data analyses was done at two levels of descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (the covariance analysis and the t test of two independent groups) at a significance level of 0.05 in SPSS version 25.

These results show the effectiveness of group training based on the acceptance and commitment therapy to increasing psychological flexibility (p<0.001) and reducing alexithymia (p<0.001) in mothers with children with special LDs. The effect size of commitment and acceptance therapy on the changes in variables of psychological flexibility and alexithymia in the experimental group was equal to 0.47 and 0.53, respectively.

Based on the findings of the research, group therapy education based on acceptance and commitment is effective in improving psychological flexibility and reducing alexithymia in mothers of children with LDs.