The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on Ruminating in Adolescent Female Athletes with Athletic Injury

Rumination can be considered as one of the most important problems for injured athletes. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on the reduction of rumination in adolescent female athletes with athletic injury. The method of the study is a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest and follow-up with a control group. The population of the present study was comprised of adolescent female athletes with sports injuries in national teams, leagues and national competitions in 1398 in Tehran, from which 30 participants were selected using  convenience sampling, and they were randomly assigned to two groups of 15 (experimental and control group. Then, in pre-test all participants completed the Nolen-Hoeksema’s (2003) Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS) questionnaire. In the next phase, the experimental group received an eight-session intervention (90 min each, twice a week), while the control group did not receive any intervention. The results of repeated measures ANOVA and following pairwise comparison revealed significantly less ruminative scores for experimental group in the post-test and the follow-up test; however,  the control group did not perform significantly different in all three tests. Moreover, in the post-test and the follow-up test, the experimental group had lower scores than that of control group. The results indicated that the acceptance and commitment therapy reduced the rumination in professional adolescent female athletes with athletic injury.