Investigating the Effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Clinical Symptoms, Anger Control and Emotional Regulation of Bully Children

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy in clinical symptoms, anger control and emotional regulation of bully children. This research is a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study design with a ‎nonequivalent ‎control group. The research sample comprises 24 bully children who were purposefully selected from among the students who had responded positively to the researcher’s call. The participants were randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups. Group therapy intervention was conducted on the experimental group during ten sessions. The tools applied in this study consisted of Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire by Garnefski et al., State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory by Spielberger and Bullying Scale by Illinois, Espelage and Holt and the subjects answered to their questions in the stage of pretest and posttest. In this research, the data was analyzed based on the analysis of covariance test and with the aid of SPSS software. The findings demonstrated that dialectical behavior therapy has a significant impact on clinical symptoms, anger control and its components and emotional regulation and its components (P < 0.01).