Comparison of the Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment-based Therapy and Emotion Focused Cognitive Therapy on Health Anxiety of Patients with Cardiac Arrhythmia

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of acceptance-based therapy and emotion-based cognitive therapy on health anxiety in patients with cardiac arrhythmia in Tehran in 2020.

The present research method is quasi-experimental and a pre-test-post-test design with two experimental groups and a control group has been used to collect data. The statistical population of the study consisted of all cardiac arrhythmia patients of Amirabad Heart Hospital in Tehran, from which 60 people were selected by available sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental groups (20 people in each group) and one control group (20 N) were assigned. The acceptance and commitment therapy test period lasted for 10 sessions of 90 minutes and the emotion-oriented cognitive therapy experimental group received 10 sessions of 90 minutes and the control group remained on the waiting list. The tools used in the present study included health anxiety (1) which were used in two stages of pre-test and post-test. The analysis of the data obtained from the questionnaire was performed through SPSS-v23 software in two parts: descriptive (frequency, percentage frequency, mean, standard deviation and amplitude of changes) and inferential (analysis of covariance and multivariate analysis of covariance).

The results showed that both interventions used in this study could significantly reduce health anxiety in patients with cardiac arrhythmia, but the rate of reduction in the acceptance and commitment group in the health anxiety variable was greater than emotoin focused cognitive therapy.

The results also showed that the components of health anxiety in the group based on acceptance and commitment in the variable of disease outcomes were more than the group of cognitive emotion therapy.