The effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) on Social physique anxiety, impulsive behaviors and emotional self-regulation in obese women

Obesity is one of the biggest challenges facing public health services in the 21st century and is the main cause of preventable deaths in developed and developing countries. One of the psychological reasons for people's overeating and obesity as a result is anxiety, impulsive behavior and lack of regulation of emotions. The purpose of the present study was to determine the effectiveness of emotionally focused therapy on physical-social anxiety, impulsive behaviors and emotional self-regulation of obese people.

The method of the present study was quasi-experimental with pre-test-post-test design with experimental and control groups with follow-up. The statistical population of the research consisted of all obese women living in Tehran in 2022. In order to measure the research variables, Social physique anxiety scale (SPA) by Hart et al. (1989), the impulsivity questionnaire (BIS-11) by Barrett et al. (2004) and the emotional self-regulation scale by Hoffman and Kashdan (2010) were used. The research method is quasi-experimental with pre-test-post-test design and follow-up (one month) with control group and random assignment of subjects. First, 30 people were selected by by convenience sampling method and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (15 people each). Then, the experimental group received emotion-focused therapy during 8 therapy sessions, one session of 90 minutes per week. Both groups were measured in three stages: pre-test, post-test and one-month follow-up. The data were analyzed by multivariate variance analysis using SPSS-22 software.

The findings of the research showed that emotion-focused therapy was effective on Social physique anxiety, impulsive behaviors and emotional self-regulation in obese women (p=0/05). This effectiveness was sustained in the follow-up period.

Based on these findings, it can be concluded that emotional therapy can be used as an effective intervention to reduce physical-social anxiety and impulsive behaviors and improve emotional self-regulation in obese people.