The Effectiveness of Positive Psychology on Pain Acceptance and Control of Emotions in Cancer Patients: A Randomized Clinical Trial Study

Today, cancer as the most important cause of human mortality has received much attention in the world so that it has a large number of psychological studies. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of positive psychotherapy on accepting pain and controlling the emotions of cancer patients.

This study was a randomized clinical trial with a pretest-posttest and follow-up. The statistical population of this study consisted of men with cancer in Kohgiluyeh city in 2018-2019. The statistical sample consisted of 26 cancer patients who were purposefully selected and randomly divided into two groups of positive psychotherapy (13 patients) and the control group (13 patients). The McCracken & Walls scale was used to collect data to measure pain acceptance and the Williams & Chambers scale was used to measure emotion control. The experimental group received positive positivity during eight 90-minute sessions of psychotherapy, but the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were analyzed using MANCOVA and ANCOVA analysis in SPSS-25 software.

The results showed that positive psychotherapy was effective on pain tendency, active participation, and the overall score of acceptance of pain, anger, depressed mood, anxiety, positive emotion, and the overall score of emotion control in the post-test phase (P <0.05), but persistence had no effect (p>0.05).

 Positive psychotherapy is effective in accepting pain and controlling the emotions of cancer patients and psychologists can use the results of the present study for therapeutic interventions based on positive psychotherapy to increase pain acceptance and control the emotions of cancer patients.