The Role of Life Review on Life expectancy and Family Cohesion Among Mental Retardation Students

1. Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Zahedan, Iran, *Corresponding author email: hjenaabadi@ped.usb.ac.ir 3. MA Student, Educational Psychology, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Zahdan,Iran. Introduction One of the inevitable events that may occur in some families is the birth of mental retardation children. These children include a significant number of people in all human societies. Therefore, any action to optimize their living conditions can reduce the variety of social, cultural, economic problems and reduce the family problems along with it. The birth of a child with special needs can have different effects on the family and create a wide range of emotional responses to the father, mother and other family members. For someone, this is a crisis and requires great psychological regulation. For someone, the birth of a child with special needs is an unfortunate event, and the initial response can be emotional collapse (Sharma et al., 2015). Parents of children with special needs experience a stressful life, and these conditions endangers their mental health (Verma, Srivastava, & Kumar, 2017). Parents who have children with special needs not only suffer from special characteristics of these children, such as challenging behaviors, mental retardation and physical Abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine the role of life review on life expectancy and family cohesion among mental retardation students. The present study was a quasi-experimental study of two groups with pre-test and post-test and the statistical population was comprised of all students with mental retardation in the secondary school of Birjand that according to the physician, did not have mental retardation and psychological disorders also they had ability to answer questions and willingness to cooperate. The statistical sample of research consisted of 40 subjects who were voluntarily selected and randomly divided equally into two experimental and control groups. Measurement tool was Miller life expectancy questionnaire (1988) and Olson family cohesion (1991). First, all the samples responded to the questionnaires. Then, a treatment plan of life review was performed for the experimental group based on Haight and Webster’s life review (1995) at 8 sessions (each session 60 minutes), and the post-test was taken from the experimental and control group. Data were analyzed using covariance analysis and SPSS16 software. The results showed that life review has been effective in increasing the life expectancy and family cohesion of mental retardation students.