Comparison of the Effectiveness of Gestalt Therapy, Behavioral Activation and Placebo on the Cognitive Emotion Regulation in Multiple Sclerosis Patients: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Psychological state of multiple sclerosis patients is very important due to its strong influence on incidence, progression, prognosis, and treatment of this disease. The present study compared the effectiveness of gestalt therapy, behavioral activation and placebo on cognitive emotion regulation in Multiple Sclerosis patients.

This study was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design with a control group and three months follow-up in which sixty patients with multiple sclerosis referred to the MS Clinic of Rasoul Hospital in Tehran were selected. Using four blocks, the authors randomly assigned participants to four groups of 15 people, including three intervention groups and a control group. Members of psychotherapy groups were treated once a week for eight 90-minute sessions. In the placebo group, capsules containing rice flour were used once a day for 8 weeks.  The people in the control group received no intervention during this period. The research instrument was Garnefski's (2006) Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. SPSS (25) was used for data analysis.

The results showed that gestalt therapy and behavioral activation in comparison with placebo and control groups increased the mean scores of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies (p=0.001) and decreased the mean scores of non-adaptive strategies (p=0.001) in post-test and follow-up. Gestalt therapy, in comparison with behavioral activation, increased the mean scores of adaptive strategies (p=0.027) and also decreased the mean scores of non-adaptive strategies (p= 0.020) more significantly in post-test and follow-up.

Gestalt therapy is more effective than behavioral activation and placebo in improving cognitive emotion regulation in patients with multiple sclerosis.