The Effectiveness of Emotional Schema Therapy on Distress Tolerance and Emotional Regulation in Physical-Motor Disabled People in Mashhad City

People with physical-motor disabilities face different emotions due to special conditions during life. This research aimed to study the effectiveness of emotional schema therapy on distress tolerance and emotional regulation in physical-motor disabled people.

The method of the present study was quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design and follow-up with the control group. The statistical population included all physically disabled people aged twenty to fifty years old who had a rehabilitation record in 2019 in the welfare of Mashhad, where fifteen people were selected and randomly assigned for each experimental and control group by available sampling method based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Both groups completed the distress tolerance and emotion regulation questionnaire as the pre-test. The experimental group was trained in eleven sessions of sixty minutes according to the protocol of emotional schema therapy (Leahy 2015), while the control group did not receive any intervention. The data were analyzed using SPSS25 by repeated measures analysis of variance.

The results showed a significant difference between the scores of distress tolerance and emotional regulation in the experimental group in comparsion to control in the post-test stage. (P<0.05) Therefore emotional schema therapy was effective on distress tolerance and emotional regulation variables.

The results indicate that emotional schema therapy could be effective in increasing distress tolerance and improving emotional regulation.