Comparing the Effects of Acceptance and Commitment Group Therapy and Social Skills Training on Metacognition, Self-Esteem, Self-Focused Attention, and Social Phobia

Having a network of healthy family and close friends can be helpful when working in a healthy environment. Such a healthy environment can improve individuals’ sense of wellbeing and physical health. A great proportion of an individual’s life is dedicated to working and their spiritual and financial needs are achieved by working; therefore, understanding and managing work-related problems are critical to controlling the associated adverse effects. There exists an urgent need to investigate effective psychosocial therapies in reducing employees' functional problems. Furthermore, social skills are crucial in interpersonal interactions and training. Thus, the present study aimed to compare the effects of group-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Social Skills Training (SST) on metacognition, self-esteem, self-focused attention, and social phobia.

This was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest and a control group design. The statistical population of the study consisted of all employees working in public organizations in Arak City, Iran, in the second half of 2018. The inclusion criteria of the research included the age of 25-60 years, no history of physical and mental illnesses, and completing the screening tests. The screening criteria were receiving higher scores than the cut-off point (40) in the Social Phobia Inventory (Connor et al., 2000), the Short Form of Metacognition Questionnaire (Wells & Cartwright-Hatton, 2004) (cut-off point: 70), the Focus of Attention Questionnaire (Woody et al., 1997) (cut-off point: 15), and the Self-Esteem Inventory (Coopersmith, 1967) (cut-off point: 23). The selected study sample was 64 individuals. Then, using the sample size formula to test the hypothesis on the mean value, 45 qualified volunteer subjects were selected as the sample by a simple sampling method. The study participants were randomly divided into 3 groups of ACT, SST, and control. The necessary data were collected using the above-mentioned inventories. The group-based ACT (Hayes et al., 1999) and the SST program were implemented in ten 90-minute sessions. In this study, descriptive statistics (including mean & standard deviation) and inferential statistics, including Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) and Bonferroni posthoc test were used to analyze the obtained data. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS at the significance level of 0.05.

The MANCOVA results, after controlling the pretest effects, for comparing the effects of the provided interventions revealed a significant difference between the study groups concerning all components, including metacognition, self-esteem, self-focused attention, and social phobia (p<0.001). Furthermore, metacognition, self-esteem, self-focused attention, and social phobia were 70%, 55%, 47%, and 51% explained by the effects of the interventions, respectively. The Bonferroni posthoc test data indicated no significant difference between the experimental groups in metacognition (0.919), self-esteem (0.919), self-focused attention (0.899), and social phobia (0.098); accordingly, their effectiveness was the same. However, the test groups were significantly different in the mentioned variables, compared to the control group (p<0.001).

According to the current research results, the presented group-based ACT and SST could effectively reduce metacognition, self-focused attention, and social phobia, and increase self-esteem in the explored employees.