Effects of Emotion-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy on Stress and Anxiety among Teachers of Students with Intellectual Disabilities: An Intervention Effectiveness

AbstractBackground: One of the most challenging occupations in the world is teaching.Objectives: This considers points to assess the adequacy of emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral treatment intercession to decrease the anxiety and stress of teachers of intellectually disabled students.Methods: We adopted a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design in this study. The statistical population included all female teachers working in schools for children with special needs in Yazd, Iran, from 2021-2022. In this study, 30 eligible teachers were selected via the purposive sampling method. The participants were then assigned to two experimental groups (n=15) and a control group (n=15). The experimental groups received emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (ECBT) in 10 90-minute sessions once a week, while the control group received no training. In this study, the Teachers' Stress Inventory and Beck's Anxiety Inventory were developed. The data were analyzed in SPSS software (version 20) using Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA).Results: According to the results, both the intervention and control groups experienced a clear change in stress and anxiety levels before and after the intervention. Moreover, the most significant effect was observed when it comes to feeling anxious (0. 74), signifying that the independent variable was responsible for 74% of differences in anxiety between the experimental and control groups.Conclusion: As evidenced by the obtained results, ECBT effectively reduced stress and anxiety among teachers of students with intellectual disabilities.

Effects of Emotion-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy on Stress and Anxiety among Teachers of Students with Intellectual Disabilities: An Intervention Effectiveness Keywords:

anxiety , Emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy , Intellectual disabilities , Stress , Teachers