The role of psychological flexibility, difficulty in emotion regulation and intolerance of uncertainty in predicting psychological distress and obsessive - compulsive in patients with type 2 diabetes during the covid-19 epidemic

The increasing threat of the Covid-19 disease and public health emergencies around the world have led to the exacerbation of various psychological problems in vulnerable groups, including patients with diabetes; Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the role of psychological flexibility, difficulty in emotion regulation and intolerance of uncertainty in predicting psychological distress and obsessive - compulsive in patients with type 2 diabetes during the covid-19 epidemic.

The method of this research is descriptive-correlation. The statistical population of this research included all patients with diabetes referred to the health centers of Kermanshah city in 1401. For this purpose, 220 of these people were selected by available sampling method and answered psychological flexibility questionnaire, emotion regulation difficulty scale, intolerance of uncertainty scale, Kessler's Psychological Distress Questionnaire Moudsley Obsessive Compulsive Inventory. After collecting the questionnaires, the collected data were analyzed using Pearson's correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis simultaneously.

The results showed that there is a significant relationship between psychological flexibility, difficulty in emotional regulation and intolerance of uncertainty with psychological distress and obsessive - compulsive in patients with type 2 diabetes (p<0.01). The results of multiple regression analysis also revealed that 76.2% of the variance of psychological distress and 77.5% of the variance of obsessive-compulsive is explained by psychological flexibility, difficulty in regulating emotions and intolerance of uncertainty. 

According to the results, it is possible to use interventions based on psychological flexibility in the treatment of ACT, emotion regulation training and the ability to intolerance of uncertainty to reduce the psychological distress and obsessive problems of patients with type 2 diabetes.