Social Anxiety in Students With Learning Disability: Benefits of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

objective: the present study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of ‘acceptance andcommitment therapy’ (act) on reducing social anxiety in students with learning disability.method: in this experimental research, pretest-posttest and control group were utilized.population of this study included all the middle-school male students with learning disabilityin koohdasht city (2013-2014). the sample included 40 male students with learning disabilitywho were randomly selected after structured clinical interview. subjects were randomlyput into experimental group and control group (20 individuals each). instruments of thisresearch included structured clinical interview, raven iq test (1962), and watson & friend’sanxiety scale (1969). pretest and posttest were administered for both groups. experimentalgroup received acceptance and commitment therapy model for 10 1-hour sessions, while thecontrol group received no intervention. to analyze the data, multivariate analysis of variancetest (manova) was used. statistical package for social science 16 (spss 16) program wasused for statistical analysis.results: the results of manova showed that acceptance and commitment therapy modeltraining has been effective on decreasing social anxiety in students with learning disability (p <0.001). the findings also showed that there is a significant difference in social anxiety betweencontrol group and experimental group.conclusion: according to the findings of this study, acceptance and commitment therapymodel training reduces social anxiety in students with learning disability and it is possible tomake use of this model as a suitable intervention method.