Background and Purpose: Many factors contribute to the high-risk behaviors of students, including the lack of skills necessary to cope with difficult life situations. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of compassion therapy on adjustment and happiness of students with high-risk behaviors.
Method: The statistical population consisted of all female students from the 10th grade in the academic year of 2017-2018 in Rasht. 30 students were selected by multistage cluster sampling and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The compassion therapy program was only applied to the experimental group for 8 sessions of 90 minutes, but the control group did not receive such intervention. Iranian adolescents risk-taking scale (Zadeh Mohammadi, Ahmad Abadi & Heidari, 2011), adjustment inventory for school students (Sinha and Singh (1993), and Oxford happiness questionnaire (Argyle & Lu, 1989) were used to gather of data. Data analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance.
Results: The results of data analysis have shown that compassion therapy has been effective on happiness and all aspects of adjustment including social and educational dimensions except emotional dimension (p <0.001).
Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, the use of compassion therapy due to the training of mindfulness techniques and enhancement of self-compassion has a significant impact on the lives of students with high-risk behaviors and led to an improvement in their adjustment and happiness.