The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Training on Distress Tolerance, Resilience and Emotion Regulation in Students with Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder can have many negative psychological consequences. As a result, the aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of mindfulness training on distress tolerance, resilience and emotion regulation in students with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.

This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was a semi-experimental with a pretest, posttest and two-month follow-up design with a control group. The research population consisted of secondary high school female students with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder in one district of Tehran city, which number of 30 people of them after reviewing the inclusion criteria were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced in two equal groups (each group 15 people). The experimental groups received 8 sessions of 90 minutes with method of Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness training (2003) and during this time the control group did not receive training. The dara were collected by short scale of generalized anxiety disorder (Spitzer et al., 2006), distress tolerance scale (Simons and Gaher, 2005), resilience scale (Connor and Davidson, 2003) and emotion regulation questionnaire (Gross and John, 2003) and were analyzed by methods of variance analysis with repeated measurements and LSD post hoc test in SPSS software.

The findings of the present study showed that mindfulness training led to significant increased the distress tolerance, resilience and emotional reappraisal and significant reduced emotional suppression in students with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, and the results remained in the follow-up phase (P<0.001).

According to the results of this study, health professionals and therapists can use the method of mindfulness training along with other methods to improve health-related characteristics such as distress tolerance, resilience and emotion regulation.