Extended Abstract
Background and Objectives: Because of their limited capacity for abstract thinking, children struggle to articulate their emotions and sentiments effectively. The act of suppressing emotions and lacking the ability to express them poses a potential threat to a child’s mental well-being. Therefore, the implementation of accurate health and mental policies to ensure physical and mental health in childhood is essential. Playing serves as a means for children to communicate their needs, emotions, and thoughts. Establishing a proper connection between children and the world is achieved through social interactions and group activities. According to previous studies in the field of child psychology, play therapy is an approach for addressing emotional stress, and it is of significant importance that the environmental design aligns with the needs of this method. It allows children and adolescents to develop motor skills, test their behavioral (social) skills, simulate different scenarios, and put the various positive and negative consequences of their behaviors in a safe and attractive context. Theories related to social cognition have also suggested that, in addition to individual traits, environmental factors play a role in the behavioral well-being of children. In order to create an integrated process in the development of children with anxiety disorders, therapeutic interventions should be planned with the help of appropriate architectural design, considering the role of environmental variables in meeting the needs of children. Therefore, recognizing the effective playful environmental components and their evaluation and prioritization in architectural design is important.  This article aims to describe the significance of environmental design in the context of play therapy and to create environmental components tailored to design spaces that align with the play therapy approach for children dealing with anxiety. The objective is to establish an environment conducive to the cognitive-behavioral therapy process, facilitating the improved growth and development of children with anxiety disorders.
Methods: The present study, which was conducted by descriptive-analytical method, in order to achieve the desired goals, first reviews the results of previous research in this field and identifies effective factors in promoting mental health in children with anxiety disorders based on play therapy techniques, relying on bibliographic studies and open interviews with psychologists in counseling centers. Accordingly, related game-centered spatial attributes were explained based on the principles of Axline game therapy. To validate the important link between spatial principles and the analysis of psychologists’ questionnaire, we utilized the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP is a versatile quantitative decision-making method commonly used to tackle complex multi-criteria problems across various domains. It helps select options and criteria by assessing their relative effectiveness concerning one or more criteria. A pair-wise comparison matrix was distributed among 12 psychologists and occupational therapists for this purpose. In the subsequent phase, the substantial correlation between each principle and the environmental capacity priority identified in the earlier stage was investigated. Additionally, the influence of playful spatial elements were ranked. To achieve this, we analyzed data collected from a questionnaire administered to a sample of 120 individuals using SPSS 21 software. This questionnaire, comprising 21 questions based on components and indicators derived from the initial study phase, explores the relationship between the independent variable (playful environmental capabilities) and the dependent variable (Axline’s play therapy principles).
Findings: Based on the research results, the key factors for improving children’s anxiety disorders, following Axline’s eight principles, were identified as part of an efficient child-centered play therapy process within a proposed hierarchical model consisting of eight criteria: a sense of belonging, participation, openness, adaptability, liberty, security, clarity, and safety. The priority of environmental capabilities linked to each of these eight principles was established using a hierarchical analysis method and further substantiated through statistical significance tests validating these associations. 
Conclusion: Based on the extracted results, creating a sense of belonging to the place, feeling of freedom in the environment, mental security and creating a safe environment for the physical comfort of the child are the most important influencing factors, followed by factors such as readability, participation, permeability and flexibility. This research is in line with the results of previous studies and the results of the present study show the confirmation of the proposed playful environment capabilities and how the play environment and children’s social-cognitive behavior are related in accordance with related study sources.