The Effect of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy on Emotion Regulation and Health Hardiness in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

Present study was conducted aimed to determine the effect of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on emotion regulation and health hardiness in patients with type 2 diabetes.

This study was semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with control group. The research population was patients with type 2 diabetes of Zahedan city in 2020 year. The research sample were 40 people who were selected by available sampling method and randomly replaced into two equal groups. The experimental group 8 sessions of 90-minute underwent the intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy and the control group did not see any training. The research tools were the Gross and John emotion regulation questionnaire (2003) and Gebhardt and et al revised health hardiness inventory (2001). Data were analyzed by methods of chi-square, independent t and multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS version 25 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups had not significantly different in terms of age, gender, education, marriage and duration of disease (P>0.05). Also, the groups in the pre-test stage had not significantly different in terms of emotion regulation and health hardiness (P>0.05), but in the post-test stage had significantly different in terms of both variables (P<0.05). In the other words, intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy significantly increased emotion regulation and health hardiness in patients with type 2 diabetes (P<0.001).

Due to the effect of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on increasing emotion regulation and health hardiness, planning is necessary for the use of this treatment. As a result, health professionals and therapists can use intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy along with other therapies methods to improve the psychological characteristics, especially improving emotion regulation and health hardiness.