Psychological interventions in health and diseases
fatemeh فاضلی ثانی
Abstract
The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of emotion focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy on alexithymia and difficulty in emotion regulation in patients with pain disorder. The method of the present study was a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design and control group ...
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The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of emotion focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy on alexithymia and difficulty in emotion regulation in patients with pain disorder. The method of the present study was a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design and control group and two-month follow-up. The statistical population of the study included all women who referred to Manoushan and Behsa counseling centers in Tehran with psychosomatic problems and pain. Sixty people from this population were selected and randomly divided into three groups (20 people in each group). Research instruments included the Toronto Emotional Dysfunction Scale (Bugby et al., 1994) and the Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) (Gertz & Roemer, 2004). One group received 12 one-hour sessions of emotional focused therapy and another group received 10 one-hour sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. But the control group did not receive any intervention during the study. In addition to descriptive statistics, mixed variance analysis and Ben Foroni post hoc test were used to analyze the research data. The results for alexithymia showed that the emotional focused therapy group had a significantly lower mean than the cognitive behavioral group (P= 0.02) and the control group (P= 0.001), and cognitive-behavioral group has a significantly higher mean compared to the control group (P = 0.001). Also, the results for the difficulty in emotion regulation showed that the emotional focused group and the cognitive behavioral group have significantly lower means compared to the control group (P = 0.001). The results of the present study, in addition to confirming the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy, indicated that emotion focused therapy is a more effective treatment for alexithymia. As a result, emotion-focused therapy can be considered as an effective treatment that can be used by health professionals to mend pain disorders.
