The efficcacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on emotional self-awareness and meta-cognitive beliefs in adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder

Patients with generalized anxiety disorder are so involved with possible future concerns that they can hardly live in the present and experience what is happening. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive therapy based on mind-awareness on emotional self-awareness and meta-cognitive beliefs in adolescents with general anxiety disorder.

The present study was a semi-experimental design with pretest and posttest design with control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of all adolescents with general anxiety disorder diagnosis in the city of Tehran in 1397- 1397, and 30 of them were selected through targeted sampling and were assigned to two groups of 15 experimental and control groups. The subjects of the mind-cognitive-based cognitive therapy group received a 120-minute session per week for 8 sessions. The research data were collected before and after the intervention and immediately after the end of the sessions by EQI questionnaire and metacognitive beliefs questionnaire (MCQ-3). Using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviations) and inferential (Multivariate covariance analysis) and analyzed by SPSS v.23 software.

The results of this study showed that the effect of cognitive therapy based on mind-awareness on emotional self-awareness and meta-cognitive components of adolescents with general anxiety disorder was statistically significant (P <0.001).

Based on the results of this study, in addition to the statistical significance, the importance of cognitive therapy based on mind-awareness of increasing emotional self-awareness and reducing the severity of metacognitive beliefs in adolescents with anxiety disorder can be emphasized and used as an effective method.