Background and Purpose: Research indicates that a number of emotional, cognitive and social elements are involved in children's cognitive-emotional development. Thus, the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of emotional development training on the social acceptance and cognitive emotion regulation in children.
Method: This study was an experimental research of control group pretest-posttest design. The study population included all the 8 to 12 year old female students in West Tehran, who were studying at grades two to six of the primary school in 2017-2018. A sample of 30 students was selected out of this population by multi-stage cluster sampling and then randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group (15 students per group). To collect the data, Social Acceptance Scale for Primary School Children (Ford& Robin, 1970) and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children (Garnefski et al., 1999) were used. At the pretest phase, both groups were assessed by the mentioned tools. Afterwards, the experimental group underwent 12 sessions of emotion development training (two sessions per week and 60 minutes per session) while the control group received no training. Data were analyzed by ANCOVA by using SPSS.
Results: Data analysis showed that after emotional development training, the social acceptance (F=10.591, P<0.01) and positive emotion regulation (F=26.950, P<0.01) increased in the experimental group, while negative emotion regulation decreased in them (F=15.887, P<0.01).
Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that if emotional development training is done continuously and in proportion to the child's ability, it can help the children to show more appropriate and social behaviors. Also, emotional development skills facilitate the access to the essential emotions and thus they can result in the persistence of the optimal behavior, elimination of the unadaptive behaviors and improvement of the social acceptance.