The Effectiveness of Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation on Empathy and Moral Judgment of Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Abstract

Introduction: Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is one of the most common destructive behavioral disorders. Today, non-invasive methods, such as transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), to control and improve the symptoms of various disorders have found a special place and may have advantages over drug treatments. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of tDCS on empathy and moral assessment of children with ODD. Materials and Methods: The research design is semi-experimental with a post-test pre-test with the control group. The statistical population of the study was all 8-11 years old boys with ODD in primary schools in Urmia, Iran in 2019-2020. Out of the total target population, by multistage cluster sampling, 30 students with ODD were selected using ODD Rating Scale (Hommersen et al, 2006), and randomly assigned into two experimental (n=15) and control (n=15) groups, then Griffith Empathy Measure (Bryant, 1982) and Moral Judgment Test (Synha & Warma, 1998) were completed by the participants. Descriptive statistics and univariate Analysis of Variance were used to analyze the data. Results: The results of this study showed that the application of tDCS significantly improved empathy and moral judgment compared to the control group. Conclusion: The study implies that psychologists and therapists may use tDCS along with other treatments to improve empathy and moral judgment of children with ODD. D