Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Psychological Hardiness, Social Isolation and Loneliness of Women with Breast Cancer

There are alternative and complementary approaches for general health issues and palliative care for women with breast cancer. The current paper aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT on psychological hardiness, social isolation and loneliness of women with Breast Cancer.

  This was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest, posttest and 8-week follow-up with a control group. The statistical population included all women with breast cancer referred to the cancer ward of Shohada Tajrish Hospital in Tehran in 2020.  30 subjects in the study were selected through purposive sampling assigned to two groups of 15 people (experimental and control). The experimental group underwent acceptance and commitment therapy interventions for 8 sessions of 90 minutes and the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were collected using Lang and Goulet Psychological Hardiness Scale, Social Isolation Questionnaire and The UCLA Loneliness Scale and ANOVA with repeated measures was used to test the research hypotheses.

The demographic characteristics included age (34,23 ±6,12), marriage length (8.46 ± 5,14), number of children (1–4 children) and education level (high school graduation = 10, bachelor degree = 9, MA/MS = 9, Ph.D. = 2).  Based on the findings, the difference between the scores of psychological hardiness (P <0.01), social isolation (P <0.01), and the variable of loneliness (P <0.01) in the three stages of the study is significant.  Also, the mean scores of all research variables in the experimental and control groups were obtained significantly (P <0.01). The results show that about 13.3%, 24.1%, and 60.7% of the individual differences in the variables of psychological hardiness, social isolation, and loneliness are related to the differences between the two groups, respectively.

According to the results, it seems that acceptance and commitment therapy is effective in increasing psychological hardiness, reducing social isolation and loneliness of women with breast cancer, and the use of this treatment method on the variables was beneficial and effective.