Comparison the Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Distress Tolerance of Incompatible Couples

Incompatible couples have many emotional, cognitive and social problems, including in the field of distress tolerance. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of comparison the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy on distress tolerance of incompatible couples.

This study was a semi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The research population was incompatible couples who referred to the Family Counseling Center of Torbat-e-Jam in 2019 year. The research sample was 24 couples who after reviewing the inclusion criteria were selected by purposeful sampling method and were replaced randomly with the lottery in three equal groups (8 couples in each group) including two experimental groups and one control group. The first experimental group with couple therapy method 8 sessions of 90 minutes underwent the emotion-focused therapy and the second experimental group with couple therapy method 10 sessions of 90 minutes underwent the acceptance and commitment therapy and the control group remained on the waiting list for training. Research tools included demographic information form, marital adjustment scale and distress tolerance scale. Data were analyzed with chi-square, univariate analysis of covariance and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS version 20 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups did not have significantly different in terms of education level and age range (P>0.05). Also, both emotion-focused therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy in compared to the control group increased the distress tolerance of incompatible couples (P<0.001), but there was no significant difference between the two mentioned methods in increasing the distress tolerance of incompatible couples (P>0.05).

The results showed that both methods of emotion-focused therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy increased the distress tolerance of incompatible couples and there was no significant difference between them. Therefore, health professionals and therapists can use both mentioned methods to improve distress tolerance in vulnerable groups, including incompatible couples.