The Effect of Emotional Techniques in Reducing Psychological Distress among Orphan Female Secondary School Students

The current research aims to verify the ineffective effects in removing psychological distress among orphan female secondary school students in schools in Basrah Governorate. In order to apply these goals to the field of study and application, and to achieve the objectives of this study, the two researchers built a scale of psychological distress based on the definition of Pearlin (1983) and built a counseling program based on emotional techniques to reduce psychological distress, taking into account the scientific steps to build measurement tools and verify the face validity and construct validity as well as the validity of the confirmatory factor analysis and extracting psychometric properties and calculating reliability in two ways. It was found that the value of the Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient was (0.72) and by the retest method was (0.84).After applying the scale to the final sample of (267) and analyzing the data using the statistical package (SPSS), the results of the study showed that there was high psychological distress among the research sample. Based on this result, a purposive sample of (20) female students who obtained the highest scores on the scale was drawn. And according to the type of experimental design adopted in the research, the experiment sample was distributed into two groups, experimental and control, in a random manner, with (10) female students in each group. The experimental group was then subjected to treatment using emotional techniques, and the treatment was withheld from the control group. After the end of the experiment period, (14) sessions were provided, two sessions per week. The researchers processed the pre- and post-measurement data for the two groups by adopting the Wilcoxon rank-sum test for two correlated samples and the Kruskal-Wallis test. The results of the post-measurement for the experimental group showed a noticeable decline compared to the results of the pre-measurement for the same group and the results of the post-measurement for the control group whereas the control group maintained a high level of psychological distress in the pre- and post-measurements. The results of the scientific experiment demonstrated the effect of emotional techniques in making change in reducing psychological distress among the experimental group, achieving the general goal of the program. In light of these results, the research concluded with a set of recommendations and suggestions.