Thesis:

The effect of group play therapy on social interaction and expression of children with mental retardation in Sabzevar in 2021

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of group play therapy on social interaction and expression of children with mental retardation in Sabzevar in 1400. This research is a quasi-experimental study in which a pre-test-post-test research design with group control has been used. The statistical population of this study consisted of all children with mental disabilities in Sabzevar in the academic year 2021-2022 and 30 of them were selected as a sample by available sampling method, based on entry and exit criteria. Subjects were randomly divided into experimental and control groups of 15 people. The experimental group received group play therapy in 7 40-minute training sessions and the control group was not provided with this training. The instruments used in this study were the standard adaptive and aggressive audacity questionnaire of Thompson and Burnbam 2011 and the social interaction questionnaire of Dadkhah, Harizuka and Mendal (1998). The data were analyzed by SPSS 22 statistical software in two sections: descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Mean ، standard deviation in descriptive statistics and multivariate and univariate analysis of covariance were used in statistics. Findings of this study show that group play therapy has an effect on social interaction and expression of children with mental retardation in Sabzevar. Thus, play therapy can be considered as an effective intervention to improve the expression skills and social interactions of children with mental disabilities..

Keywords: Keywords: Group play therapy, social interaction, assertiveness, children with mental retardation