THE INFLUENCE OF CORRECTIVE DEVELOPMENTAL WORK OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ON REDUCING THE LEVEL OF ANXIETY IN PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE

Abstract

This article analyzes the effectiveness of a psychologist's corrective developmental program for reducing the level of anxiety of primary school-age children. The study was designed in accordance with the rules of a formative experiment, in which one experimental group was involved. At the first stage of the study, empirical data on the anxiety level of primary school-age children were obtained using The Spence Children`s Anxiety Scale (SCAS-8) (short version) and the author's diagnostic procedure for studying children's anxiety, based on the unfinished sentence method. At the second stage of the study, the children were included in the corrective developmental program, the purpose of which is to improve the ability to identify their own strengths and difficulties, develop skills for optimal communicative interaction in anxiety-provoking situations, develop the ability to verbalize their own emotions, and develop emotional and behavioral self-regulation. At the third stage of the study, the anxiety level of primary school-age children was re-examined after participating in the corrective developmental program. To verify the statistical significance of the study results, the G-sign criterion was used.The G-sign test revealed no statistically significant changes in the levels of generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, and somatic symptoms of anxiety/panic according to The Spence Children`s Anxiety Scale (SCAS-8). This tendency can be possibly explained by the fact that the implementation of the corrective developmental program coincided with an increase in the incidence of respiratory viral infections and sleep disturbances of children due to the increase in air raid alarms, as well as with an indirect impact of news on children, which, in particular, increases separation anxiety.An analysis of anxiety scores study after the corrective development program, using the author's questionnaire of unfinished words, revealed a decrease in the proportion of children with a high rating of anxiety (from 19.4% to 8.3%), an increase in the proportion of children with a moderate level of anxiety (from 80.6% to 88.9%), and the emergence of 2.8% of children with a low level of anxiety. Using this G-sign criterion, it can be established that the differences between the scores obtained before and after the implementation of the corrective developmental program have statistically significant changes in anxiety level according to the author's questionnaire of unfinished sentences.Thus, the corrective developmental program has proven its effectiveness in improving one`s ability to identify their own strengths and difficulties, in developing emotional and behavioral self-regulation and in developing of one`s effective strategies for dealing with aversive situations that trigger anxiety.