Determining the Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Adaptive and Maladaptive Strategies of Cognitive Emotion Regulation of Female Students with Internet Addiction

Internet use has increased rapidly worldwide, but it may also negatively affect students' mental health and lead to behavioral and academic problems. Research has shown that maladaptive emotion regulation and types of emotional processing are essential in developing disorders related to Internet use. Also, researchers have proposed different solutions to improve the problems of addiction and dependence on the Internet, one of which is mindfulness–based cognitive therapy. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness–based cognitive therapy on adaptive and maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation of female students with internet addiction.

The present research method was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a two–month follow–up design with a control group. The statistical population of the present study consisted of all female students of a second secondary school in Lahijan City, Iran, in the 2021–2022 academic year. A total of 34 qualified volunteers of this population were included in the study by the purposive sampling method, and they were assigned into two groups of mindfulness–based cognitive therapy and a control group (17 people in each group) by random method. The Internet Addiction Questionnaire (Young, 1998) and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski, Kraaij, 2006) were employed in this research. The concurrent validity of the "Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire" was confirmed in 547 secondary–level students in the Netherlands, examining its correlation with the scale of depression, anxiety, and stress–21, with a coefficient of 0.41. Also, the reliability was reported by the internal consistency method, calculating the Cronbach alpha coefficient with the above sample for the components of adaptive and maladaptive strategies at 0.91 and 0.87, respectively. Mindfulness–based cognitive therapy was implemented for the experimental group in 8 sessions to perform therapeutic intervention. At the same time, the control group did not undergo any psychotherapy intervention. The research data before and after the intervention and two months later for follow–up were analyzed using repeated measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS26 software at a significant level of α=0.05.

At first, the demographic data of the participants were examined. No significant difference was observed between the groups in terms of age (p=0.940), education grade (p=0.960), and supervisor status (p=0.812). The findings showed that in the pretest design, there was no difference in the score of adaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation between the mindfulness–based cognitive therapy group and the control group. Therefore, the two groups were similar. In the posttest design, a significant difference was found in the adaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation score between the mindfulness–based cognitive therapy group and the control group (p<0.001). This finding implies that mindfulness–based cognitive therapy outperformed the control group in increasing adaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation in female students with Internet addiction. In the pretest, there was no difference in the score of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies between the mindfulness–based cognitive therapy group and the control group. Therefore, the two groups were similar. In the posttest, a significant difference was found in the maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation score between the mindfulness–based cognitive therapy group and the control group (p<0.001). This finding implies that mindfulness–based cognitive therapy outperformed the control group, decreasing maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation in female students with Internet addiction. Finally, at the follow–up, all changes were still stable in the experimental group.

Mindfulness–based cognitive therapy increased the adaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation and decreased the maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation in female students with internet addiction. It is suggested that the above treatment method be used to increase the adaptive strategies and reduce the maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation.