Background and Purpose: In recent years, anxiety disorders have been widespread among children and have reduced the quality of life in them. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation training on improving the symptoms of anxiety in children.
Method: The research method is semi-experimental with pre-test, post-test and follow-up design with control group. The statistical population included all children aged 8 to 12 years old with anxiety disorder who were studying in the second to sixth grade in the academic year of 2016 in Shiraz. Among them, 30 subjects were selected through purposeful sampling and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The research instrument was the children anxiety scale (Spence, 1988) and Smart driver plus (2017), which was used as a cognitive rehabilitation tool. Data were analyzed by repeated measure of covariance.
Results: The findings showed that cognitive rehabilitation significantly reduced the total score of anxiety, separation anxiety, and general anxiety (P <0.01), but there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of physical harm phobia, social phobia and obsessive thoughts between two groups.
Conclusion: Overall, the results showed that cognitive rehabilitation can improve and enhance the cognitive skills of children and thus affect the reduction of anxiety disorders.