The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Cognitive Flexibility and Perfectionism in Women

The family is the first and smallest social unit in which a person experiences collective life, and group and cooperative behavior for the first time and builds his cultural-social identity. A healthy person is the product of a healthy family, and social health is undoubtedly related to family health. The family is the most suitable system for meeting the material, mental and spiritual needs of human beings, and it has provided the best platform for providing the security and peace of mind of the members, raising the new generation, socializing the children, and meeting the emotional needs. For people, the starting point of family formation is when a man and a woman marry each other and get married to form a family. What is being paid attention to today, along with psychological issues, is the issue of cognitive flexibility. In general, the ability to change cognitive signs to adapt to changing environmental stimuli is the main element in operational definitions of cognitive flexibility. This factor requires the ability to communicate with the present and the ability to separate the person from inner thoughts and experiences. People with flexible thinking positively adjust and change their mental structure according to the environment and overcome stressful and stressful situations by accepting and tolerating them to achieve optimal mental health. Another component of research is perfectionism. Perfectionism is a motivational component that includes the individual's efforts to reach the perfect self; In other words, people have a strong drive for perfection, unrealistically high standards, compulsive effort, and all-or-nothing thinking about outcomes in the form of complete success or complete failure. These people are so scrutinizing and critical that they cannot accept their faults and mistakes or failures in different aspects of life. Of course, reaching perfection and flourishing hidden and potential talents and abilities is very valuable in itself, and in this valley, perfectionism is a positive and desirable thing, but what was mentioned is the extreme or negative aspect of perfectionism. The characteristics of perfectionism are defined in three dimensions: self-centered perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism, and society-oriented perfectionism. It seems that people's perfectionism originates from their illogical and distorted views and thoughts; therefore, to treat these people, it is necessary to be familiar with cognitive biases and thinking errors, as well as to identify how these errors appear in perfectionism. Various methods have been used to improve psychological components in people. One of these methods is a treatment based on acceptance and commitment, whose clinical effectiveness has been shown in various research to improve the psychological components of different people. Treatment is based on acceptance and commitment, which is a combination of ways of accepting and paying attention to awareness along with commitment and changing behavior, and this approach teaches people to accept their thoughts without judgment instead of challenging them, and the goal is to People should learn to identify their life values and plan and act based on them. Action therapy is one of the treatments of the third wave of behavioral therapy, which is theoretically based on the theory of the framework of mental relations, which is how the human mind creates suffering and the useless methods of dealing with it, as well as alternative contextual approaches for It explains these areas. The treatment based on acceptance and commitment is studied by teaching this point to the sample group, i.e. overweight women, life is mixed with suffering, man cannot approach his desires by avoiding and abstaining, and by distinguishing between tolerance and Accepting and emphasizing the point that tolerance is accompanied by suffering and hides passivity in itself while accepting pain (instead of suffering) is accompanied and does not stop a person from moving; Maybe it follows the weaving. Also, accepting the fact that a valuable life is accompanied by suffering and moving in the path of values requires commitment, and words do not replace experience and can strengthen the tolerance of failure. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to answer the question, is the therapy based on acceptance and commitment effective on cognitive flexibility and perfectionism in married women?

The research method is semi-experimental with two experimental and control groups, and the statistical population of the research includes all married women of 25-50 years of age who announced their desire to participate in the research in virtual space, and their number was 120. According to the research method, 30 people were voluntarily and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (15 people for each group) using the available sampling method. Data collection was done by Wall Wadner and Denier's cognitive flexibility and Hill et al.'s perfectionism questionnaires, and the intervention was done by acceptance and commitment protocol. Also, the statistical method of multivariate covariance analysis (MANCOVA) was used to analyze the data.

The results showed that the mean value and standard deviation for the cognitive flexibility variable in the experimental group were 20.65 and 6.941 in the pre-test and 73.11 and 2.915 respectively in the post-test and the control group in the pre-test. 67/13 and 3/871 and in the post-test it is 67/20 and 3/840 respectively. Also, the mean value and standard deviation for the perfectionism variable in the experimental group in the pre-test were 191.60 and 12.046 in the post-test respectively, and in the control group in the pre-test 184.53 and 16.203 respectively. In the post-test, it is 183/80 and 15/001 respectively. According to the table, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores in the total cognitive flexibility and perfectionism test group. The results indicated that there was a significant difference between the total score and the subscales of the cognitive flexibility and perfectionism questionnaires in the pre-test and post-test in the experimental and control groups of married women.

Considering the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy on cognitive flexibility, it can be concluded that the awareness of the intensity of needs and the psychology of internal control is a predictive factor of people at risk. Therefore, it can be suggested that these factors are identified and necessary information provided in consultations using this technique. This study, like all other studies, has some limitations, which can be mentioned as follows: Since the present study was conducted on married women, caution should be observed when generalizing it to married men. Also, the geographical area investigated in this research was Tehran, so the generalization of its results to cities and provinces should be done with caution. According to the results of this study, it is suggested to hold a therapy workshop based on patience and commitment in the direction of flexibility and perfectionism for married people.