Comparing the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy and Barlow transdiagnostic treatment on cognitive emotion regulation in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Regarding to high prevalence of anxiety disorders and importance of emotional regulation in these disorders, the present study aimed to comparing the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy and Barlow transdiagnostic treatment on cognitive emotion regulation in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.

The statistical community of this study consisted of all patients with clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder referred to consultancy centers of Mashhad-Iran in 2020-2021. Among them, 45 patients were selected by the convenient sampling method and divided into three groups randomly (metacognitive therapy, and Barlow transdiagnostic treatment, and the control group). The experimental groups received treatment in 8 ninety-minute sessions. The research instruments included the Brief Measure for Assessing Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). The data were analyzed through the descriptive statistics, Kolmogrov-Smirnov test, Mauchely sphericity test, and covariance analysis.     

The findings revealed that both interventions reduced difficulty in emotional regulation significantly, but the transdiagnostic treatment had higher effect size than metacognitive treatment (0.449 vs 0.141).

The present study showed that both treatment approaches of metacognitive therapy and transdiagnostic treatment can significantly reduce difficulty in emotional regulation in patients with generalized anxiety disorder, although transdiagnostic treatment has more effectiveness than metacognitive therapy.