Determining the Effectiveness of Emotional Self-regulation Training on Academic Vitality and Tolerance of Turmoil in Male Students with Exam Anxiety

 One of the educational system's concerns is the learners' anxiety. Exam anxiety is considered an emotional reaction or state of stress that occurs before and during the test, and many students feel it is a threat. In the process of students' academic activity, in addition to exam anxiety, other factors can adversely affect their academic performance. One of these factors is academic vitality. On the other hand, the stress of exam anxiety is higher in students who can tolerate less turbulence. One of the new approaches to students' academic and psychological health is emotional self–regulation training. Emotional regulation is the process by which individuals consciously regulate their emotions and respond appropriately and quickly to the demands of the environment. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of emotional self–regulation training on academic vitality and disturbance tolerance in male students with exam anxiety.

 The method of the present study was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design and a control group. The statistical population consisted of all male students with exam anxiety studying in the first grade of high school in Shahid Majid Meshkani Boarding School in Khoshab City, Iran, in 2021. Among them, 30 qualified individuals were included by available sampling and randomly assigned to research groups (15 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group). The inclusion criteria were as follows: willingness to participate in the research, resident of Khoshab City, suffering from exam anxiety based on the cutoff score of 40 in Spielberger's Test Anxiety Inventory, and lacking specific physical and mental illness according to the clinical interview. The exclusion criteria were reluctance to participate in the research, absence of more than two sessions from the intervention program, and simultaneous participation in other therapeutic or educational sessions. The research instruments for data collection were the Test Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger et al., 1980), the Academic Vitality Questionnaire (Dehghanizadeh & Hossein Chari, 2012), and the Turbulence Tolerance Scale (Simon and Gahr, 2005). Only the experimental group received emotional self–regulation skills using the Gross model in eight 90–minute sessions. Multivariate and univariate analyses of covariance were employed to analyze the data. All of these tests were performed at a significant level of 0.05 in SPSS software version 21.

 The results showed that, after removing the effect of the pretest, there were significant differences in the posttest scores in the disturbance tolerance variable (p<0.001) and the subscales of absorption (p<0.001), evaluation (p<0.001), adjustment (p<0.001), and academic vitality variable (p<0.001). Considering the eta square, 0.447 of the changes in disturbance tolerance, 0.303 of the absorption changes, 0.270 of the evaluation changes, 0.330 of the adjustment changes, and 0.356 of the academic vitality changes were caused by the effect of emotional self–regulation training.

 According to the research findings, emotional self–regulation training is useful for improving the academic vitality and stress tolerance of male students suffering from test anxiety, and this intervention can be used to increase stress tolerance and academic vitality.