The Effectiveness of Schema Therapy in Experiential Avoidance and Anxiety Sensitivity of Students with Academic Procrastination

The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of schema therapy in experiential avoidance and anxiety sensitivity of students with academic procrastination at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences. It was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The statistical population included students with academic procrastination studying at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in the academic year 2021-2022. The first sample of the research consisted of 500 students who were selected by the multi-stage cluster sampling method. These people answered the academic procrastination questionnaire of Solomon and Roth Bloom (1984), and 152 of them who got at least one score higher than the standard deviation score were separated from Among them, 42 people who met the criteria for entering the research were selected and placed in two groups of 21 people (experimental and control group). The experimental group received schema therapy; however, the control group did not receive any intervention. Other tools of this research include. Reiss et al. (1986) Anxiety Sensitivity questionnaire, and Gamez et al.’s (1988) Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance questionnaire. the research hypotheses were tested through multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) through SPSS software (version 25). The results showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and the control groups in the post-test phase in terms of experiential avoidance (p <0.0001, F = 42.81) and anxiety sensitivity (p <0.037, F = 4.67). This difference was also observed in the follow-up phase. Therefore, according to the findings of this study, schema therapy can be used to reduce experiential avoidance and the anxiety sensitivity of students with academic procrastination.