The Effect of Compassion Focused Training on Hope, Life Satisfaction and Alexithymia of Delinquent Female Adolescents

Introduction: Delinquency is a social phenomenon and delinquents in compared to others are more affected to psychological disorders. One of the relatively new educational methods and derived from the third wave of psychotherapy to reduce psychological disorders is compassion focused training. Therefore, present study aimed to determine the effect of compassion focused training on hope, life satisfaction and alexithymia of delinquent female adolescents. Methods: The method of this study was semi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design and control group. The research population was delinquent female adolescents of Zahedan city in 2020 year with number of 167 people. The research sample consisted of 30 people who after reviewing the criteria to entering study were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned into two groups of 15 people. The experimental group received compassion focused training based Gilbert package (2009) for 8 sessions of 90-minutes and the control group receive no training. Research tools were the questionnaires of hope (Snyder and et al, 1991), life satisfaction (Diener and et al, 1985) and Toronto alexithymia (Bagby and et al, 1994). Data analyzed with the tests of Chi-square, independent t and multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS software version 22. Results: Based on the Chi-square test the experimental and control groups weren’t significant difference in terms of their age and parentschr('39') education (P>0.05). Also, based on the independent t test the experimental and control groups in the pretest didn’t have significant difference in terms of hope, life satisfaction and alexithymia (P>0.05), but groups in the posttest have significant difference in terms of all three variables (P<0.001). In addition, the results of multivariate analysis of covariance showed that compassion focused training led to increase hope (F=84.75, P<0.001) and life satisfaction (F=81.46, P<0.001) and decrease alexithymia (F=65.20, P<0.001) of delinquent female adolescents. Conclusions: The results indicated the effect of compassion focused training on increasing hope and life satisfaction and decreasing alexithymia in delinquent female adolescents. Therefore, therapists and health experts can use from compassion focused training method along with other educational methods to improve psychological characteristics delinquent female adolescents including their hope, life satisfaction and alexithymia.