Background and Aim: Having healthy non-handicapped children plays a major role in mental health of the family and decreases family and society&aposs costs. While consanguineous marriage could lead to expression of recessive genes and a variety of handicaps including deafness, the aim of present study was to scrutinize the prevalence of consanguineous marriage among parents of deaf and normal children as well as its relationship with deafness.
Methods: In this study, 467 couples parenting normal children were selected by cluster sampling from elementary, guidance and high schools of Ardabil city and 423 couples parenting disabled children were selected non-randomly among which 130 had deaf children. Descriptive statistics was used to determine the prevalence of consanguineous marriage and chi-square test to compare prevalence of consanguineous marriage among parents of normal and deaf children.
Results: Descriptive analyses showed that 80 out of 130 (61.54%) parents who had deaf children have had consanguineous marriage. Furthermore data analysis demonstrated that prevalence of consanguineous marriage was significantly higher among parents of deaf children (p<0.001).
Conclusion: Consanguineous marriage plays a major role in expression of recessive genes and could lead to development of various handicaps including deafness. Increasing couples&apos awareness about consequences of consanguineous marriage and conducting genetic counseling are indispensable.

Background and Aim: Empathy is a basic human skill that is important in daily life. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of the theory of mind in predicting empathy.

Methods: This study adopted a causal-comparative design. 40 students with profound hearing impairment and 40 students with normal hearing, aged between 8 and 14, participated in the study. Instruments including false belief tasks and empathy questionnaires were distributed to the participants. For multivariate analysis of variance, a correlation analysis and multiple regression methods were used.

Results: Results indicated a significant difference between the total score of false belief tasks and empathy in students with hearing impairment and those with normal hearing (p<0.001 ). A significant relationship between the theory of mind and empathy was found in both groups (p<0.01). Also theory of mind could predict the empathy (p=0.001).

Conclusion: Based on the obtained results, significant reduction in the theory of mind and empathy was seen in students with hearing impairment. Therefore, training programs that focus on social skills are required for students with hearing impairment in order to address this problem. Moreover, training materials need to be tailored to their cognitive understanding.