The effectiveness of mindfulness training on the resilience and ambiguity tolerance of breast cancer patients

Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases and it is very important to perform appropriate psychological interventions to improve the psychological health of breast cancer patients. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness training on resilience and tolerance of ambiguity in cancer patients.

The current research method was semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design and a control group. The statistical population of this research was all cancer patients in Tehran in 1400, 30 of them were randomly selected and replaced in two experimental and control groups. Mindfulness-based training was conducted for the experimental group for 8 sessions, but no intervention was conducted for the control group. The research tools in this research were Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness training protocol, Connor and Davidson's resilience questionnaire (2003) and Friston's ambiguity tolerance (1994). The statistical method used was multivariate covariance analysis, which was done using Spss version 23 software.

The results of this research revealed that mindfulness training significantly reduces uncertainty tolerance and increases resilience in people with cancer, the significance level of which was 0.01 with an effect size of 37%.

The results of this research can have therapeutic implications for all hospital workers who work with patients with cancer, in the sense that interventions based on mindfulness training should be made for cancer patients.