The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Therapy on Difficulties in Emotion Regulation and Cognitive Fusion in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a significant health problem. Patients with diabetes disease struggle to control their stress and manage their emotions. Accordingly, emotion regulation seems to be a primary principle for evaluating and managing emotions. In recent years, some researchers have introduced mindfulness-based approaches based on existing cognitive-behavioral interventions (the third wave of behavioral therapy). The present study aimed to determine the effects of mindfulness therapy on the difficulty in regulating emotions and cognitive fusion in patients with type 2 diabetes.

This research was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design and a control group. The study’s statistical population consisted of all female patients with type 2 diabetes, referring to the diabetes center of Karaj City, Iran, in the Spring of 2018. To collect data, a sample of 30 women was selected using a convenience sampling method. The inclusion criteria were as follows: being 20 to 50 years old, having a three-month sugar level of more than 0.7, not suffering from any other disease, not changing the dose of insulin consumed during the three months of the experiment, not undergoing any other treatment, not taking psychiatric drugs and being interested in participating in the research. The exclusion criteria for the experimental group were as follows: excessive absenteeism in training sessions and lack of cooperation in the training program. The research tools were the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Graz and Roemer, 2004) and the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire (Gillanders et al., 2014). The experimental group subjects received 8 sessions of mindfulness therapy, and the control group received no treatment. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS using univariate and multivariate analysis of covariance analysis. The significance level was set at 0.01.

The present study results demonstrated a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in difficulty in emotion regulation (p<0.001) and cognitive fusion (p<0.001). The mean±SD values of difficulty in emotion regulation of the experimental group before and after the intervention were 20.40±2.44 and 18.36±2.38, respectively; the same scores for the cognitive diffusion were 41.80±2.50 and 40.86±2.23 respectively. Additionally, the effect size values were 0.476 for the difficulty score in emotion regulation and 0.361 for cognitive fusion.

Based on the findings, mindfulness therapy effectively reduces the difficulty in emotion regulation and cognitive fusion of type 2 diabetic patients. Therefore, in addition to pharmacotherapies, it is recommended to consider psychological aspects to reduce the mental problems of patients with type 2 diabetes.