The effectiveness of quality of life therapy on communication skills, addiction to cyberspace, marital satisfaction, and emotional self-regulation in couples

 Evidence suggests that excessive and borderless relationships in virtual networks seriously damage trust between couples and cause marital strife, separation, and even divorce. But could quality of life therapy on Communication skills and addiction to cyberspace be effective?

The present study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of quality of life therapy on communication skills, addiction to cyberspace, marital satisfaction, and emotional self-regulation in couples.

The present research was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest, two-month followup design with control group. The research statistical population consisted of couples with Internet addiction and communication problems in the city of Isfahan. Among them, 20 couples were selected through purposive sampling and placed randomely into the experimental (10 subjects) and control (10 subjects) groups. The research instruments included the Internet addiction questionnire (Young, 1991), the emotional self-regulation questionnaire (Hofmann and Kashdan, 2010), the communication skills questionnaire (Queen Damm, 2004), and the marital satisfaction questionnaire (Olson, 2006). Quality of life therapy (Frisch, 2006) was administered on the experimental group at eight 90-minute sessions once a week. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA.

The results showed that the quality of life therapy had significant effects on addiction to cyberspace (F=83/89, p<0/001), communication skills (F=282/65, p<0/001), emotional self-regulation (F=162/66, p<0/001), and marital satisfaction (F=70/78, p<0/001). These results continued during the follow-up period too.

Generally, it was found that couples’ quality of life therapy may be used as a new and effective method to improve addiction to cyberspace, emotional self-regulation, communication skills, and marital satisfaction of couples.