The Effectiveness of Treatment Based on Acceptance and Commitment on Reducing Emotion Regulation, Aggressive Behavior and Self-Mutilation in Students

 Adolescence is considered one of the most critical periods of life. Due to the rapid technological, cultural, and social changes in today's societies, adolescence is associated with many physical, psychological, and social problems for several adolescents and is the basis of many risky behaviors and social harms caused by it this period in adolescents. Is placed Changes in this period of growth may cause certain problems. When adolescents cannot successfully overcome developmental crises and challenges, they will experience psychological distress and significant disruption in the normal flow of daily life and emotional, social, and cognitive aspects. One of the subjects investigated in this course is the occurrence of high-risk behaviors such as self-harm and self-mutilation. Self-mutilation is an intentional, impulsive, non-lethal act that causes injury to a person's body. Self-mutilation refers to localized and conscious self-destruction, which is caused by the inability to tolerate the aggressive impulses internalized by a person, to punish himself or others. Approximately 1% of the population uses self-harm during their lifetime to cope with a crippling situation or feeling. Self-harm makes people imperfect. It is difficult to understand this behavioral phenomenon and it occurs in a very simple way or in an emotional situation where a person is under pressure. The overall prevalence of narcissism in the general population is 4% and in clinical samples, it is 21%, which is 3 times higher in men than in women. It begins in early adolescence and can be the first manifestation of a severe mental illness. Regarding self-mutilation behavior, several models have been proposed. One model is the self-regulation model, which considers self-mutilation as a compensatory measure to relieve anger, anxiety, or emotional distress. They have unpleasant tension and by harming themselves, they reduce this unpleasant feeling in themselves. The therapeutic approach of acceptance and commitment is a new therapeutic approach and uses the processes of acceptance, mental focus, commitment, and behavior change processes to create psychological flexibility. According to the mentioned materials and the study of the background of the research conducted in the field of this topic, it can be said that the treatment method based on acceptance and commitment can have a positive effect on regulating emotions and reducing aggressive behavior of people, and also there is a gap of studies in This field is the researcher's motivation for the research to investigate this situation more closely. Finally, the contents of this research, it is an attempt to answer the basic question of whether treatment based on acceptance and commitment reduces emotion regulation, aggressive behavior, and self-mutilation. Does it affect students?

The research method was quasi-experimental and the statistical population included teenage students with self-mutilation who were referred to the school counseling core and were referred to the emergency room of Zahedan city hospital in 1400. The sampling method was simply random, which included 40 people in three groups (20 people with acceptance and commitment therapy and 20 people as a control group). The research tools included the cognitive regulation of emotion questionnaires of Granfsky et al. (2003), aggression AGQ, and self-injury (SHI)). The experimental group received the intervention treatment method based on acceptance and commitment using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques in 8 one-and-a-half-hour sessions based on Bond and Hayes's (2004) treatment package. The obtained data were analyzed using SPSS statistical software with multivariate analysis of covariance tests.

The results showed that the therapy training program based on acceptance and commitment had a significant effect on improving emotion regulation and reducing aggressive and self-harming behavior of students.

In explaining this finding, it can be stated that treatment based on acceptance and commitment, unlike most treatments, does not seek to change the content of thought. For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders seeks to help clients reduce their distress by changing cognitive and behavioral responses to anxiety. In fact, cognitive-behavioral therapy enables clients to create a new communication network of compatible thoughts and behaviors that compete with incompatible networks and memories and eliminate them. To achieve this goal, cognitive-behavioral therapy includes these components: training on the nature of fear and anxiety, reviewing signs and symptoms, training on body relaxation and correct breathing, cognitive reconstruction, behavioral tests, and imaginary exposure. And alive with mental images, bodily sensations, and situations, preventing responses. In cognitive reconstruction, clients learn to challenge the validity of anxiety-inducing thoughts, identify the cognitive errors that these thoughts reflect, and create alternative thoughts for them. Behavioral experiments directly challenge anxiety-based predictions. It helps clients approach the feared stimulus and see if their expected consequences occur. Response prevention confronts clients with the stimulus and anxiety-causing contexts, and at the same time prevents anxiety-reducing behaviors and avoidance behaviors. But treatment based on acceptance and commitment is a behavioral treatment that uses the skills of mindfulness, acceptance, and cognitive dissonance to increase psychological flexibility. In therapy based on acceptance and commitment, psychological flexibility means increasing the client's ability to connect with their experience in the present and choose to act in a way that is appropriate based on what is possible for them at that moment. With their chosen values, establishing this situation can have a positive effect on regulating people's emotions. In the alternative explanation, the treatment is based on acceptance and commitment to cognitive reconstruction, acceptance of symptoms, and control of behavior. Acceptance in therapy based on acceptance and commitment is defined as: "Accepting an event or situation and letting go of the dysfunctional symptom control program and an active process of feeling emotions as emotions, thinking thoughts as thoughts, and so on. Acceptance should not be confused with tolerance or submission. Both of these are passive and imperative. In fact, acceptance means being aware of inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical symptoms) and actively accepting them, without taking action to reduce them and without taking action based on their verbal aspect, in treatment based on acceptance and commitment to control and Avoidance is a context in which experiencing an internal event in this context can be traumatic. Therefore, instead of focusing on changing that internal event, the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy therapist seeks to change this context. By changing this context and turning it into a context of acceptance, any internal event can be experienced without being traumatic. And by changing this context, the goal of functional Contextualism, i.e. predicting behavior and influencing behavior, is realized.