Comparison of the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy on alexithymia among male prisoner clients

Various studies have confirmed the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy on improving mental health indices among clients with different problems, but no study has compared the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy on alexithymia among male prisoner clients.

The present research was conducted by the aim of comparing the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy on alexithymia among male prisoner client.

The current research was a semi-experimental study which was conducted through a pretest-posttest with control group design. The research population included all the male prisoner clients in Aligoodarz city, Iran, in 2019 who were totally 209 individuals. The sample included 45 prisoners who were selected by purposeful sampling method and were assigned into three groups including two experiment groups and one control group (15 subjects per group) ny random assignment method. The research tool was Toronto Alexithymia Scale of Bagby, Parker and Taylor (1994). The first experiment group received the compassion-focused therapy (Gilbert, 2010; 2014) and the second experiment group received reality therapy (Wubbolding, 2013) both in eight 90-minute sessions. The control group received no intervention until the end of the research. The univariate analysis of covariance and the Bonferroni ad hoc test were used to analyze the data.

Results suggested that both therapeutic interventions were effective on improving alexithymia in the experiment groups (p< 0/01). Moreover, there was no significant difference between compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy and both had similar effectiveness (p> 0/05).

The results of the present research provide an appropriate empirical support for compassion-focused therapy and reality therapy. Psychologists and counselors working in prisons are recommended to use these two approaches for enhancing mental health among prisoners.