Background: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in children, characterized by challenges in cognitive emotion regulation, empathy, and emotional dysregulation. This disorder can impair children’s social, academic, and emotional functioning. Play therapy, as a non-invasive intervention, holds significant potential for addressing these issues.
Objective: This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of play therapy on cognitive emotion regulation, empathy, and emotional dysregulation in children with ADHD in Bushehr, Iran.
Methodology: The present study is a semi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design and a two-month follow-up period. The statistical population of this study included children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in Bushehr city, and the statistical sample included 30 people (15 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group) who were selected through convenience from the Education and Training Counseling Center of Bushehr province. Play therapy was provided to the experimental group in 8 45-minute sessions. Data collection tools included the Garnevsky Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children (2002), the Toronto Aphasia Scale (Reif, Strold, & Tourette, 2006), and the Khosravi Larijani Child and Adolescent Empathy Questionnaire (1399), which were completed before and after the intervention and also after two months in the follow-up phase. The control group did not receive any intervention, and repeated-measures variance statistical tests were performed in SPSS software.
Findings: The results showed that play therapy significantly improved cognitive emotion regulation, especially in adaptive strategies such as positive reappraisal and reducing maladaptive strategies such as rumination, and the effectiveness rate for the positive reappraisal component and then the self-blame leader was higher than the other components and was equal to 0.5