Purpose: The aim of present study was comparison the 
effectiveness of group therapy based on compassion and group 
reality therapy on psychological hardiness in mothers with 
autistic children.
Materials and Methods: The study was quasi-experimental 
with pre-test, post-test and follow-up design with control 
group. The research population was mothers with autistic 
children referred to counseling and psychotherapy centers for
autistic children of Tehran city in the second half of 2018 year. 
The research sample was 45 people who were selected by 
available sampling method and randomly with lottery assigned
into 2 experimental groups and 1 control group. Each of the 
experimental groups was trained for 8 sessions of 90 minutes, 
separately with methods of group therapy based on 
compassion and group reality therapy and the control group 
was placed on the waiting list for training. The data were 
collected with the scale of psychological hardiness (Kobasa et 
al., 1982) and analyzed with the methods of analysis of 
variance with repeated measurements and Bonferroni's post 
hoc test in SPSS software.
Findings: The findings showed that both intervention 
methods of group therapy based on compassion and group 
reality therapy in compared to the control group led to increase 
the psychological hardiness and all its three components 
including commitment, control and challenge in mothers with 
autistic children and the results remained in the follow-up 
phase (P<0.05), but between the intervention methods there 
was no significant difference in the increase of psychological 
hardiness and all its three components among them (P>0.05).
Conclusion: The results indicated the effectiveness of both 
intervention methods of group therapy based on compassion 
and group reality therapy on increasing psychological 
hardiness and all its three components and no significant 
difference between them. Therefore, the use of the mentioned 
methods along with other effective treatment methods can play 
an effective role in improving the psychological hardiness.