Effectiveness of acceptance and commitment group therapy on psychological flexibility and resilience of women with breast cancer

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is one of the psychological methods to result in greater resilience and psychological flexibility by facing the previously avoided situations. The purpose of present study was to determine the effectiveness of group therapy based on acceptance and commitment on psychological flexibility and resilience of women with breast cancer.

In this pretest-posttest designed research, 50 people were non-randomly selected and randomly divided into experimental and control groups each containing 25 individuals. Acceptance, function and resilience measures were used and Multivariate Covariance Analysis (MANCOVA) was performed for inferential analysis.

The means of psychological flexibility and resilience in the posttest were respectively 44.2500 and 95.0000 in the experimental group and 34.0000 and 77.2400 in the control group. The means difference was significant between experimental and control groups that shows the efficacy of ACT therapy in women with breast cancer. The effect of ACT therapy in the posttest phase on the variables of psychological flexibility and resilience was 0.30 (p=0.000) and 0.19 (p=0.048), respectively, which means that 30% of the variance of psychological flexibility scores and 19% of variance of Resilience scores in posttest were due to acceptance and commitment therapy.

Acceptance and commitment therapy increases the psychological flexibility and resilience of women with breast cancer.