Comparing Effectiveness of group interpersonal psychodynamic psychotherapy and group emotion focused therapy on girl’s adolescent generalized anxiety disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is one of the most prevalent disorder among adolescents’ girls and early relationships quality with parents play an important role for its development that it should be considered for treatment. It was aimed to investigate and comparing effectiveness of group interpersonal psychodynamic psychotherapy (GPIP) and group emotion focused therapy (GEFT) on girl’s adolescent generalized anxiety disorder.

The research method was experimental with pre-test, post-test and control group. The statistical population consisted of all 15-17 year-old girls with GAD in Shiraz high schools. Among them, 30 adolescents were randomly selected and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Interventions of experimental groups consisted of 16 sessions of GPIP and 10 sessions of GEFT. All groups were evaluated by GAD-7 questionnaire in pretest, posttests and follow up. The data were analyzed using repeated measure variance and for pairwise comparison using post hoc.

Both GPIP and GEFT methods in comparison with the control group caused to significant reduction of GAD in post-treatment. Also, the results showed that in the follow up session, only the scores of the psychodynamic group were significantly lower than the control group, but there was no significant difference between the scores of the emotional-focused and control group.

  According to the results of the study, both GPIP and GEFT can be effective in improving the symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder in adolescent girls.