Effectiveness of Teaching the Positive Thinking on the Quality of Life of Married Old Women

Transcription

1 Effectiveness of Teaching the Positive Thinking on the Quality of Life of Married Old Women Roksana Partovinia * Department of psychology, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran Corresponding author Ahmad Ashouri PhD, psychology, Department of psychology, Arak branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran Abstract The present study was conducted with the aim of examining the effectiveness of positive thinking training on quality of life in married elderly women. All married elderly women who referred to Zoroaster Women Organization in Tehran consisted the statistical population of the study. The participants were selected by a call and an available sampling method. 30 individuals the other individuals of the population in Quality of Life Questionnaire were selected as the sample of the study. Among the samples, 15 individuals were randomly assigned into experimental group and 15 individuals were randomly assigned into control group. And variable of control received no training. In this study, mean and standard deviation was used as descriptive statistic and covariance analysis was used for inferential statistics. The results of the present study showed there is a significant relationship between experimental and control groups after implementing positive thinking training in case of mental health and quality of life in post-test( P<0.05). Conclusion: The results showed positive thinking training increased mental health and quality of life in elderly married women. Keywords: Positive thinking training, Quality of life. Page 1548

2 Introduction Each human being is constantly thinking. In fact, thinking is the main work and the only activity which we do. As a result, thinking quality is the primary determinant in our lives. In each field, each role and each position that we have in life, skillful thinking is useful and conversely, weak thinking will be problematic inevitably, waste times time and power and creates frustration and affliction. Knowledge and skill cannot by themselves improve the performance. An important factor in this regard is the way of thinking; if it is positive, we are able to remove the internal barriers in our way and conversely, if we have negative thinking, then these internal barriers would have control over us and finally they overcome us. For this reason, psychologists always recommend people to leave the negative and pessimistic thoughts and have a look at themselves, people and the world and events around them (Ghavidel, 2010). Positive thinking is an emerging movement in the area of contemporary psychology which emphasizes on the need to understanding the positive aspects of human experiences and also the fact that what makes life valuable to live (Ghavidel, 2010). This scientific area is looking for understanding fully the area of human experiences, from shortage, affliction and disease to human flourishing, health and welfare (Tork & et al, 2014). Positive psychology in a 21 st -century psychology which is attempting to know that how can welfare be facilitated, health be promoted and positive capabilities be created rather than telling us how to decrease the stress, how to cure the diseases and how to recover the inabilities and weaknesses. That's why Seligman believes that the question of what is welfare and mental and how to create them should be converted into the objective of all public policies (Nasirnejad & et al, 2014). Positive-thinking psychologists, among them Seligman, believe that through combining ideas of Rogers theory we can provide conditions in which experts move towards a happier and healthier life while helping to facilitate their capabilities flourishing (Seligman, Esten, 2005). The most important principle in positive-thinking psychology is prevention; i.e. exploring the human capabilities and the fact that there are some traits in contrast to the psychopathology named "human positive traits" which forms the main core of prevention (Seligman, 2002). Those people with high degree of happiness mainly experience positive emotions and assess the peripheral events and accidents positively, whereas the people with low sense of welfare assess their lives' events unfavorably and experience more negative emotions like anxiety, depression and anger. On the basis of attributional style, Seligman believes as the depression is raised due to occurrence of the attributional errors among the people, optimism and happiness can be created through establishing the health attributional styles in people. Therefore, the main task of prevention is to teach optimism; i.e. recognizing the catastrophic thoughts and learning a set of skills for challenging these thoughts and creating self-strengthening (Seligman, 2002). In primary prevention, the positive psychological question is that how does the happiness become a public policy. In the secondary prevention, the positive psychology believes that the role of therapists is not simply to reduce the distress and leaving the person without disease symptoms, but facilitating the welfare and flourishing can be taken into account as a factor in prevention (quoted from Ghavidel, 2010). One of the psychological components that have important role in individuals' mental health, is the concept of quality of life. Quality of life, that has great emphasis on health, focuses on Page 1549

3 various aspects of life such as physical, emotional, cognitive and social aspects. And affects a lot of fields and life periods. In other word, quality of life is a degree that individual enjoys the existing facilities of life and is satisfied( Bagheri et al. 2005). Quality of life is a multidimensional concept that refers to being well in general and includes functional capacity, mental states, social performance, physical health and understanding the health. Also, individuals' quality of life is a personal perception that is defined through individuals' feeling about their health or nonmedical aspects of their life( Abbasi, 2006). Senescence is one of the important stage in each person's life. In this stage, positive thinking affects life duration in addition to quality of life and mental health. With having positive point of view about life, not only individuals feel success and satisfaction but also can change senescence into a positive experience. This is the key for successful and positive senescence period. Even when the individuals becomes 80 or 90 years old, be benefitted from fitness, health and level of activity. Increasing the level of knowledge in this stage can compensate little reduction that appear in individuals' mental abilities. Achieving wisdom means the individual can even act better than young generations, emotionally. Because of increasing the experiences, there is no reason that the power and capacity of elderly people for sexual pleasure decrease because of increasing the age. Aspects of healthy senescence includes having happy face, clean and tidy appearance, straight physical condition and agility in movements. Being elderly often causes individuals to be satisfied with the easy and with least trouble choices and familiar ideas and thoughts that are accustomed to. It means that they are not willing to experiencing and risking and hence deprive themselves of the future prosperities. Considering what is said, the present study aims to examine the effectiveness of positive thinking on quality of life in elderly married women. Method With regard to the subject, this research is of experimental type with random replacement along with pretest-posttest with control group, as shown in the following diagram. Based on the research method, through referring to the Tehran Zoroastrian Women Organization and making necessary coordination with its authorities, participants were met and given the briefing plan and after getting familiarized with the research objectives and process, 30 persons were selected by convenience method. and were assigned into experimental and control groups randomly.. Then, from among them, 15 persons were selected randomly and put into the experiment group and 15 persons were also selected randomly for the control group. Then, the subjects were taught in 10 sessions, each 90 minutes, for one month, two sessions every week and in group form in one of the classes of Tehran Zoroastrian Women Organization. As to the experiment group, the independent variable (teaching the ways to enhance the positive thinking) was applied but no teaching was given to the control group. After finishing the course, both groups were retested (posttest). In this study, it was attempted to prevent the samples drops through making the sessions time flexible, but absence of few subjects discretely in teaching sessions led to irregularity in sessions, because during the next sessions, the said skills should had been explained again. Two years after the last session, questionnaires were given to both control and experiment groups (implementing posttest). Then, the results of pretest posttest were compared Page 1550

4 for both control and experiment groups, the raw data were extracted from the questionnaires and analyzed by SPSS software. In ethical point of view, it is necessary to provide the training package at the end of research for those who cooperated with the researcher but put in the control group. But, the researcher taught them the positive thinking for 10 sessions, each 90 minutes. Content of sessions were taken from the works of Suzan Kuiliam translated by Barati & Sadeghi as well as the positive-thinking psychological interventions translated by Foroughi & Aslani & Rafiei. The curriculum presented during these sessions included three general areas as below: Positive thinking towards self; Positive thinking towards others Positive thinking towards life Table. A brief description of training sessions of positive thinking Session No Session Subject Measurement and making the members familiarized with each other and with consultant as well as expressing the structure and rules of sessions and group and familiarizing with the concept of positive thinking and its signs and symptoms Reviewing the positive introduction and identifying the capabilities How to explore the thoughts, beliefs, feeling and negative emotions and ways to modify them Method of Implementation: primary measurement (pretest) and familiarizing with definitions of positive thinking and its application Method: conversation between the members and researcher making group members familiarized with their abilities through thanks-giving and familiarizing with definitions of thoughts, beliefs, feeling and emotion familiarizing them group members' with these concepts and and exploring and recognizing them Worksheets Considerations Sessions in Group members' comments and attitudes about the rules and their roles and distributing the worksheet of positive introduction Distributing the worksheets in relation to applying the capabilities in practice and thanks-giving 1. Thanks-giving handbook 2. Worksheet for thee bad memories 3. Worksheet for registration and questioning by ABCDE 4. Exercising the Page 1551

5 4 5 Self-esteem and constructive speeches Familiarizing with the basics and components of forgiveness and teaching the positive thinking 6 Effect of thanksgiving 7 8 Keeping the positive behaviors and teaching two techniques Establishing good relations with others and introducing 4 response styles How to use the language and constructive speeches and how to enhance the self-esteem Method: it was done operationally by the researcher and members identifying the objectives of forgiveness program for converting the positive emotion to the negative one Investigating the effect of thanksgiving and familiarizing with its concepts Method: How to prepare thanksgiving letter and to send it familiarizing with how to keep the positive behaviors and obtaining two techniques for when it is not possible to think positively. "it seems that" & "planning" Method: Implementing the methods by the researcher and members Establishing and expanding good relations with others daily thoughts registration in their handbook 1. Distributing the worksheet of satisfaction against perfectionism 2. Making positive sentences 3. Making confirmatory sentences Distributing worksheet instruction forgiveness letter Worksheet thanksgiving and sending it the for of of letter 1. Writing the daily plan 2. Writing the daily report 3. Report on using the "it seems that" method Distributing the active-constructive responding worksheet Page 1552

6 magic hours and scores of positive thinking in elderly Determining the effect of positive thinking on members and responding to questions and familiarizing with effects of active, passive, constructive, destructive responses in relations. Method: Practically by the members and researcher Familiarizing with the methods for improving the relations and successful marriages and awareness from scores of positive thinking in old age Method: Practically by the members and researcher Determining the effect of positive thinking on members' lives Method: expressing the feeling on subjects and experiences said during the sessions Worksheet of 5 magic hours instruction Taking posttest (tests of quality of life) Measurement tools World Health Organization (WHO) Quality of Life Inventory This questionnaire consists of 26 items which examines the individual's quality of life from different points of view in the Likert 5-degree scale of which two questions are about the general feeling of persons from his/her The other items evaluated individuals' feelings and behaviors in recent two weeks in case of physical and psychological hygiene and health, social relationships and social environment ( Omranifard, Ismaeeli nejad, Maraee & Davarpanah, 2009). After doing needed evaluation, points of 4 to 20 will be achieved for each aspect separately that point 4 shows the worst situation and point 20 shows the best situation. The results reported for reliability and validity of Quality of Life Questionnaire by designers of Quality of Life Questionnaire of world Health Organization in They evaluated 4802 individuals from 15 countries, 4104 individuals from 13 countries and 2369 individuals from 5 countries and achieved its reliability using Chronbach's alpha that Page 1553

7 was reported 0.66 to 0.84 for four subscales and the whole scale. It shows good internal consistency( Nasiri, 2006). Its validity is correlation coefficients between 0.89 to Findings Quality of life Descriptive information of quality of life scale is given in table 1 for pretest and posttest stages for both experiment and control groups as well as all people in the sample. Table 1; Descriptive information of the quality of life based on the measurement stages in groups Variable Experimental group control group Pre-test Post-test Pre-test Post-test Mean Std Mean Std Mean Std Mean Std quality of life Also, as can be seen, the average of quality of life in the experiment group in posttest stage has increased compared to the pretest. One sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test (Data Normality Test) H 0 = Data is obtained from the normal population (P 0.05). H 1 = Data is not obtained from the normal population (P 0.05). Table 2; One sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test Variable Sig P Z quality of life In view of the results in table 3: and significance levels achieved, if research variables are higher than 0.05, then the null hypothesis is approved and data for both related variables are normal and parametric variables can be used for testing each variable. Variance Homogeneity For examining this hypothesis, Levine's test was used of which the results are mentioned in table 3. Table 3.; F Levine's Test for investigating the variance homogeneity in both control and experiment groups Variable Sig F df2 df 1 quality of life As can be seen, the assumption of equality of variances for both variables is established (P 0.05). Page 1554

8 Table 4; M Box's Test for investigating the covariance variance matrix homogeneity in both control and experiment groups Variable Sig F df2 df 1 M Box's quality of life As can be seen, the assumption of equality of covariance variances matrix is established (P 0.05). In view of all assumptions discussed above, it is observed that this study's data are able to enter the covariance analysis and differences in both groups can be investigated in the dependent variable. Table 5; multivariate covariance analysis test for posttest scores in both experiment and control groups TEST Value F Hypothe Error df Sig sis df Pillai effect test Wilks' Lambda test Hotelling effect test largest root test Results of table 5 shows that after deleting the effect of pretest by multivariate covariance analysis test, there is a significant effect for factor of positive thinking training of "dependent variable". This effect indicates that among at least one of the dependent variables, there is significant difference between experiment group and control group (Wilks lambda = 0.07, P 0.05). Table 6; One-way covariance analysis test in multivariate covariance analysis context Index Variables Source Change SS df F Sig Effect size Ability test quality of life Group Discussion and conclusion: The present aims at determining the effectiveness of training the positive thinking on quality of life among the married old women from Tehran Zoroastrian Organization. Results showed that there is significant difference between subjects of both experiment and control groups in terms of amount of quality of life in posttest stage. Results of table 9.4 show that by deleting the effect of Page 1555

9 pretest variable, the second research hypothesis indicating existence of significant difference in the variable of quality of life among the old married women of experiment group than the control group is approved. As can be seen in table 4.9, significance level achieved for the variable of self-efficacy is less than the significance level of obtained from Bonferroni correction for multivariate covariance analysis (dividing the significance level 0.05 by 2 dependent variable). As a result, in regards to the obtained means, it can be said by 95% confidence that the variable of quality of life in experiment group has increased compared to the control group. As a result, in regards to the obtained means, it can be said by 95% confidence that quality of life of experiment group has increased compared to the control group. This results are consistent with the ones obtained from the study by Bajhordi, Refahi & Farahbakhsh (2011) in which the effect of training the positive thinking skills in group form on the motivation to progress, self-esteem and happiness was investigated. In this study consisting 120 students from first grade of high school in Jiroft City, the researchers concluded that training the positive thinking skills has a significant effect on increase in scores for motivation to progress and happiness. Results of this study also indicate that training the positive thinking skills has had no significant effect on the self-esteem of students. Overall, the results obtained in present study approves the usefulness and effect of training the positive thinking skills in increasing the progress motivation and happiness among the high school students. Marzyeh Nasir (2010) conducted a research in which the relationship between the styles for coping with stress and resilience and optimism on 300 girl students of high school in Dezfool City was investigated. Results of her research showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between problem-focused coping style and optimism and also between resilience and optimism among the students and there is a negative and significant relationship between emotion-focused coping styles and ineffective coping style with optimism among the students. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that the predictor variables of stress coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, ineffective) and resilience explain 7% of variance of criterion variable (optimism). In a research by Sohrabi & Javanbakhsh (2010) in which they tested the effectiveness of empowering the positive thinking skills in group form on the locus of control among the students on 40 students of second grade in high school, they concluded that independent t-test between two experiment and control groups is significant. In other words, training the positive thinking skills is effective in changing the locus of control. They state that the results of this study are consistent with other researches based on which the usefulness and effect of training the positive thinking skills in internalizing the locus of control among the high school are approved. In explaining these findings, it can be deduced that since the positive thinking is a way for thinking which make persons be able to have an appropriate presumption towards their attitudes and emotions, interests and talents and make the best decisions while keeping his calmness and positive thinking means being positive with others. Compromise with others established good relationships and on the other hand the more your relationships with other, the more you will be flexible in emotional point of view. Having positive internal conversations with own and positive speeches with others are effective in good mood. Considering this matter that quality of life has emphasized more on health during last decades, it also focuses on other aspects of life such a physical, emotional, cognitive and social ones and most areas and time periods of life. In other Page 1556

10 words, quality of life is an extent to which a person enjoys existing facilities and feels satisfied. Quality of life is also a multidimensional concept which refers to public goodness among the people and includes functional capacity, mental states, social performance, physical health and understanding the health. The quality of life of a person, is a personal understanding which is shown by people's feeling about their health or non-medical aspects. Therefore, in view of the role which positive thinking plays in creating the proper mental states and enhancing the person's social performance and consequently achieving a high level of enjoyment due to the existing status of life, it seems that training the positive thinking has increased the quality of life among the members of experiment group. Page 1557

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