the Effectiveness of Emotion-based Therapy and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy on the Pain Severity and Resistance in Women with Chronic Headaches

Theoretical advances in research have provided the necessary basis for conceptualizing headache as a psychiatric physiological disorder, eventually leading to using behavioral and psychological treatments. This study aims to compare the effectiveness of emotion-based therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy on the pain severity and resistance in women with chronic headaches.

This study was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest follow-up with the control group. Its population consisted of all women with headaches referred to the Governmental Neurological Clinic of Parsabad city in 2020. Thirty patients diagnosed with chronic headaches by a psychiatrist or neurologist were selected using purposive sampling and were randomly divided into three groups. The treatment groups received 8 sessions of 1.5 hours treatment specifically; however, the control group did not receive any treatment. The collected data were analyzed by repeated-measures ANOVA and Bonferroni post-hoc test.

The mean of pain severity and resistance in the pretest in the emotion-based therapy group, acceptance & commitment-based therapy group, and control group was 8.50, 43.00, 8.70, 42.10, and 8.40, 43.50 (p<0.816 and p<0.860), respectively. The results showed an insignificant effect of emotion-focused therapy (6.70, 59.80) and acceptance & commitment-based therapy (4.80, 66.30), compared to the control group (8.20, 42.80), in the posttest. There was a decrease in the pain severity and an increase in resistance in women with chronic headaches (p<0.001). The results also showed that the effect of acceptance and commitment therapy on the severity of pain and resistance in posttest and follow-up was more than that of emotional therapy (p<0.001).

Emotion-focused therapy and acceptance & commitment-based therapy reduce the severity of pain by increasing the resistance of patients with chronic headaches, thus being considered a useful preventive strategy.