The Effectiveness of teaching Emotion Regulation skill Based on dialectical behavioral therapy on Psychological Distress and Cognitive Flexibility Cardiovascular Patients

Emotion regulation involves all conscious and unconscious strategies that are used to increase, maintain and reduce the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive components of an emotional response. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching discipline-based emotional discipline based on dialectical behavioral therapy on psychological distress and cognitive flexibility in cardiovascular patients.

The present study is a semi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test with control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of all cardiovascular patients in Kermanshah in 2018. Among them, 30 subjects were selected through available sampling method and randomly assigned to two groups of experimental and control (each group was 15). Intervention of teaching skill Emotion Regulation Based on dialectical behavioral therapy for the experimental group was performed in 8 sessions of 90 minutes, while the control group did not receive any interventions during this period. Depression, Anxiety and Stress Questionnaire (DASS-21) and Cognitive Flexibility Questionnaire (CFI) were used to collect information. To analyze the data, multivariate analysis of covariance was performed using SPSS software version 20. 

Data analysis showed that there is a significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-test and post-test of the experimental and control groups (P<0/05); that is, the discipline-based excitement education based on dialectical behavioral therapy reduces depression, anxiety and stress and increases the cognitive flexibility of the experimental group Compared to the control group.

According to the results, it is possible to use the emotional ordering based on dialectical behavior therapy to improve the psychological distress and cognitive flexibility of heart patients.