Improvement of Subjective Well-Being in Students With Physical Disability: Mental Rehabilitation Based on Teaching Emotion Regulation Skills

Objective: Disability can affect people’s quality of life and lead to lower mental health in life. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching emotion regulation skills as a way to increase subjective well-being in students with a physical disability. Methods: This study employed a quasi-experimental design, with pretest-posttest, and control group. The study population comprised high school male students (n=26) with a physical disability who were studying in the Soroush school, Tehran, a special school for students with a physical disability. Students were selected by Purposive sampling method and were assigned randomly to experimental and control groups (n=13, each group). The experimental group received eight sessions (twice a week) of emotion regulation skills, while the control group followed their daily routine. Keyes and Magyar-Moe Mental Health Continuum-Long Form (MHC-LF) were compared before and after the intervention between experimental and control groups. Results: The findings of this study demonstrated that training of emotion regulation skills has a significant effect in the experimental group on increasing the subjective well-being of students with a physical disability (P 0.05) in comparison to control group. Data analysis was done using statistical software SPSS (version 23). MANCOVA test was performed to examine differences between the two groups Conclusion: The training of emotion regulation skills could be an effective tool in improving the subjective well-being of students with a physical disability in the experimental group. The group training needs to be adopted by medical practitioners on a cohort for validating its effectiveness on a larger population.