Effectiveness of Schema Therapy on Cognitive Avoidance of Female Students with Early Maladaptive Schemas

The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the efficacy of schema therapy on the cognitive avoidance of female students with early maladaptive schema. The present study had an experimental design with pretest, posttest, control group and two months follow up period. The statistical population of the present study included secondary school female students with early maladaptive schema in the city of Isfahan in the academic year 2019-2020.Thirty female students with early maladaptive schema were selected by purposive sampling and randomly divided into experimental and control groups (each group consists of 15 adolescents). The experimental group received eight seventy-five minute sessions of a schema therapy intervention over one month (Sayyadi et al., 2017). Two students from the experimental group and two from the control group withdrew from the study. The questionnaires used in the current study included Early Maladaptive Schema Questionnaire (EMSQ) and Cognitive Avoidance Questionnaire (CAQ). The data obtained from the study were analyzed by repeated measures method ANOVA using SPSS 23 software. The results showed that schema therapy has a significant effect on cognitive avoidance of female adolescents with early maladaptive schema (p<0.001). The results of the present study suggest that schema therapy can be used as an effective therapy to reduce cognitive avoidance in female adolescents with early maladaptive schema.