Examining the Effectiveness of Psychological Immunization Training on Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Risk-Taking of High School Girls

Psychologists have always contemplated adolescence due to its role and importance in human life. One of the favorite topics of psychologists about adolescents is interpersonal emotion regulation. This regulation develops naturally and focuses on a dynamic process. Psychologists also pay attention to risk–taking. During adolescence and youth, there is a tendency towards risky behaviors. One of the strategies that can be useful in relation to the regulation of interpersonal emotions and risk–taking of adolescents is psychological immunization training, which Meichenbaum first proposed. Adolescence is a sensitive and critical period, and interpersonal emotion regulation and risk–taking play an influential role in young people's attitude to life and decision–making in stressful situations. So, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of psychological immunization program training on regulating interpersonal excitement and risk–taking in junior high school girls.

This quasi–experimental research employed a pretest–posttest and three–month follow–up design with experimental and control groups. The study's statistical population included all female high school students (N=9780) who were studying in 38 high schools in the 16th district of Tehran in the academic year of 2018–2019. This study used the cluster sampling method to select the sample population. For this purpose, three high schools were initially and randomly chosen out of 38 high schools in Tehran's 16th education district. The students of those three high schools completed the research questionnaires. Then, 30 eligible volunteer students who had the lowest score on the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski et al., 2001) and the highest score on the Iranian Adolescents Risk–Taking Scale (Zadeh Mohammadi et al., 2011) were included in the study. Next, they were randomly divided into two groups (15 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group). The experimental group underwent psychological immunization program training. The duration of this training program was 12 75–minute sessions. During this period, the control group did not receive any training. In this research, descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, percentage, and frequency) were used to describe the data, and inferential statistics were used to analyze them using repeated measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni's post hoc test using SPSS version 24 software. A significance level of 0.05 was considered for all tests.

The results showed that for the variables of interpersonal emotion regulation and risk–taking, group effect (p˂0.001), time effect (p˂0.001), and the interaction effect of group×time (p˂0.001) were significant. Also, the results indicated a significant difference between the means of the experimental group in the stages of the pretest with posttest (p˂0.001) and pretest with follow–up (p˂0.001) for the variables of interpersonal emotion regulation and risk–taking. Since there was a significant difference between the means of the mentioned variables in the posttest with follow–up stages, the effect of the psychological immunization program training was not permanent in the follow–up stage (p˂0.001).

According to the research findings, psychological immunization training helps teenagers protect themselves against high–risk situations and improves emotional regulation.