Anxiety disorders are the most common disorders in children and adolescents [1]. One of these disorders is the Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD) whose prevalence rate in children aged 6-12 years is 4%. The recent studies have shown that SAD is caused by interaction of genetic, environmental and family factors [3]. The first effective source on a child’s development is the mother [7]. Previous studies have shown that mothers’ personality traits have a significant relationship with SAD in children [8-10]. Children of mothers with a high level of dark personality are exposed to behavioral disorders [11]. Dark tetrad personality traits include narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and sadism [12, 17]. Time Perspective Therapy (TPT) has a relation with well-being, hygiene, and mental and social health of mothers and their children [23, 24]. Zimbardo and Boyd introduced five dimensions for time perspective. Past negative, past positive, present hedonistic, present fatalistic and future [20]. TPT aims to identify these five dimensions and then regulate them [26]. TPT help with improving well-being by decreasing the attention on the past negative and increasing the attention on the past positive [27]. Since the parents’ psychological well-being is reversly associated with SAD in children [34] and recent studies have shown a relationship between personality traits and TPT results [37, 38], the present study aimed to evaluate the effect of TPT on the dark tetrad personality traits of mothers and the SAD in their preschool children.

This was a quasi-experimental clinical trial with pre-test/post-test/follow-up design using a control group. The study population consisted of all preschool children with SAD symptoms in Kazerun County, Iran. Of these, the mothers of 32 children were selected as study samples using a convenience sampling method, and were randomly divided into intervention (n=16) and control (n=16) groups. The intervention groups received TPT at 6 sessions, once a week each for 90 minutes, while the control group received no intervention.

The results showed a significant reduction in SAD symptoms of children and narcissism of mothers (P<0.05) in the intervention group at the post-test and follow-up phases, while the control group showed no significant change in any study variables at the post-test and follow-up phases. The results of repeated measures ANOVA revealed that the interaction effect of time and group was signifcant only in narcissism (F=3.88, P= 0.04) and SAD symptoms (F= 21.55, P=0.001) (Table 1).



The mean post-test scores of SAD and narcissism was significantly different between the two study groups where the mean scores of the intervention group were significantly lower. This indicates the positive effect of TPT. Bonferroni post-hoc test was used to evaluate the stability of TPT effect. There was no significant difference in the mean values of the study variables between the post-test and follow-up phases. Therefore, the TPT effect remained stable at the follow-up phase. Thus, the hypothesis regarding the effectiveness of TPT in reducing SAD symptoms in children and narcissism in their mothers were confirmed.

This study revealed that TPT affects only the narcissism of mothers with SAD children. This result is consistent with the results of a previous study which showed that machiavellianism and psychopathy are associated with unbalanced time perspective and these people have past negative and present fatalistic perspectives, while people with a high level of narcissism have more balanced time perspective [54]. So the treatment of people with a higher level of narcissism is easier than that of those with other dimensions of dark personality. TPT had no effect on the other dimensions of dark tetrad personality because it required acceptance of personality from persons [57]. Moreoevr, personality is too stable and it cannot be changed in six sessions; maybe TPT can be effective if we use a longer (e.g. 6 months) follow-up period. Mothers with a high level of narcissism constantly need admiration. Children of these mothers have to respond to their mothers’ needs so that not to be punished by them which can lead to SAD [67]. It can be concluded that TPT for mothers has a significant effect on the SAD symptoms of their children.

The study was approved by Ethics Committee of Salman Farsi University of Kazerun (Code: IR.IAU.KAU.REC.1398.059) and WAS a registered clinical trial (Code: IRCT.20190818044557N1). All ethical principles are considered in this article. The participants were informed about the purpose of the research and its implementation stages. They were also assured about the confidentiality of their information and were free to leave the study whenever they wished, and if desired, the research results would be available to them.

The study was extracted from a MA. thesis of first author at the Department of General Psychology, School of Literature and Humanities, Salman Farsi University of Kazerun.

Research, sources and draft writing: Parisa Ghasemizadeh; Methodology, analysis, editing and finalization of the text: Leila Shamli; Conceptualization, validation and project management: All authors.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

The authors would like to thank the personnel of Mahya Marriage & Family Psychotherapy Clinic and all mothers who participated in the study.

 

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