The effect of schema therapy on marital conflicts: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Marital conflicts are a common phenomenon. Schema therapy is one effective approach to reducing these conflicts by assessing the impacts of individuals' past attitudes and experiences on their current relationships.

The current research was conducted to systematically investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy on marital conflicts.

Based on the PRISMA guidelines, a comprehensive search was performed in national and international databases, including the Scientific Information Database (SID), Magiran, Psych-info, Cochrane Central, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, and the Google Scholar search engine, and using advanced search strategies up to November 18th, 2021. The selected articles were precisely and comprehensively reviewed. After quality assessment using the Cochrane Collaboration tool, the required information was extracted from them and conducted a meta-analysis using Review Manager (Rev Man) version 5.2 software.

Out of 2921 articles, only 8 articles were entered into the study according to the inclusion criteria, consisting of 239 people in the intervention group and 162 people in the control group. The meta-analysis findings using the random-effects model showed that schema therapy significantly decreased marital conflicts in the participants by SMD=-46.01 (CI: -66.91, -25.11) points (P-value: 0.00001).

The use of schema therapy, whether integrated with other methods or individually, is effective in reducing marital conflicts. Thus, it is suggested that in case of a lack of efficient cognitive-behavioral therapy, schema therapy be taken into account as a complementary treatment method.