The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies, Body Image, and Resilience of Infertile Women

Infertility led to personal and social problems among women. The present study was carried out with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on cognitive emotion regulation strategies, body image and resilience of infertile women.

The method of the current study being quasi-experimental, was with pretest-posttest design with control group. The statistical population of the study included all infertile women who had referred to Ghadir Hospital of Shiraz in 2019. Using purposeful sampling method, a total of 30 infertile women were selected and were randomly categorized as experimental and control groups. In the pre-test and post-test stages, Resilience Scale, Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the body Image Concern Inventory were conducted. After performing the pretest, the experimental group received ACT for 8 sessions of 60 minutes and the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance with SPSS-22 software.

The results showed that by controlling the effect of pre-test, there was a significant difference between the mean post-test of the two groups in the variables of adaptive emotion regulation strategies (F=18.173), maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (F=16.163), body image (F=17.593) and resilience (F=16.826) at the level P = 0.01.

According to the results of this study, we can make use of ACT for the improvement of emotion regulation strategies, body image and resilience of infertile women.