사회불안장애 아동을 위한 게임 인지행동치료 프로그램의 개발 및 효과

A study on the development and effectives of game-cognitive behavioral therapy program for social anxiety disorder in children

The present study examined the effects of the G-CBT(Game-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) program on children with social anxiety disorder. Through the diagnostic process of clinical psychologists, final patients were selected among 5th and 6th graders from an elementary school based in Paju and randomly assigned to a treatment group(N=8) and a control group with no G-CBT(N=8). For the children in the experimental group, a weekly 90-minute session was conducted for 12 weeks. At post-treatment, the treatment group showed significant improvement on indices of cognitive perspective(automatic thought, irrational beliefs of cognition), emotional perspective(social anxiety) and behavioral perspective(safety behavior, behavior checklist for performance anxiety, subjective units of discomfort). In addition, the levels of both cooperation and empathy including peer relationship skills and length of presentation significantly improved. Furthermore, the effects on the cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics were maintained at the 2-month follow-up.