درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study aimed to assess the effect of spiritual therapy on psychological resilience and the spiritual well-being of caring for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test post-test design with control and intervention groups. The statistical population of the study included all caregivers of patients, who were referred to Tehran's hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, for treatment between June and September 2021. Thirty caregivers who were willing to participate in the research were selected as the sample using purposive sampling and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Each group of caregivers consisted of 15 individuals. Both experimental and control groups underwent a pretest on Conner & Davidson's (CD-RISC) Resiliency questionnaire and Spiritual well-being scale (SWBS). The experimental group received fourteen sessions of spiritual therapy (90-minute sessions twice a week), but the control group did not receive any spiritual therapy. In addition to descriptive statistics, Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to analyze the results and all analyzes were carried out using SPSS-18 software. Findings indicated that spiritual therapy showed a significant difference in the results among the two groups (P<0.001). Results showed significantly increased psychological resilience and the spiritual well-being mean scores of the caregivers in the experimental group compared to the control group after the intervention. Consequently, it is beneficial to implement practices to promote the psychological resilience and spiritual well-being of caregivers. This study provides important implications for clinical practice.

The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of metacognitive learning strategies in working memory among university students. This quasi-experimental research adopted a pretest-posttest control group design with follow-up. The statistical population included 268 students at Applied Sciences and Technology University in Tehran in 2022. The convenience sampling method was employed to select 30 students randomly assigned to two groups with 15 participants, i.e., the metacognitive training (experimental) and the control groups. The experimental group received 10 sessions of metacognitive strategy training based on the protocol of Wells (2011). Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) working memory test was conducted to collect data which were then analyzed using the repeated measures analysis of variance in SPSS. According to the findings, the pretest mean scores of the experimental group for storage and processing differed significantly from those of the posttest and follow-up stages (p<0.01). Furthermore, in terms of information storage and processing, there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and those of the control group (p<0.05). Thus, it can be stated that metacognitive learning strategies had a positive effect on improving the working memory of university students. University instructors can enhance students’ learning by creating conducive conditions for acquiring metacognitive strategies and fostering an engaging and appropriate educational environment.

Educational self-efficacy and its relationship with learners' different psychological traits can have a tremendous effect on the success or failure of the students. Thus, the present research sought to investigate whether academic self-efficacy has an effect on the students' stress derived from the education expectations based on such mediating factor as the difficulty of emotion regulation. The research method was descriptive-correlational based on structural equations. The statistical population consisted of all 800 junior female high-school students, 9th grade, from 16 State schools in the third district of Tehran. To decide on the sample size according to the number of observed variables, assigning a coefficient of 25 for each (7 variables in the model), and taking the possibility of incomplete questionnaires into account, 200 people were chosen by cluster sampling method. The data were gathered using three questionnaires: self-efficacy (Jinks & Morgan, 1999), difficulty in emotion regulation (Gross & John, 2003), and educational expectation (Ang & Huan, 2006). Using the structural equation modelling, the data analysis revealed that educational self-efficacy and difficulty in emotion regulation had a direct and significant effect on the stress caused by educational expectations. Also, an indirect effect of educational self-efficacy with the mediation of difficulty in emotion regulation was captured and the research model was revealed to predict 63% of the stress variable due to educational expectations. The study revealed the importance of cognitive factors in explaining the stress caused by academic expectations.