Comparing the Effectiveness of Mindfulness Meta-Cognitive Therapy vs Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in People With General Anxiety Disorder

This study compares the effectiveness of mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on experiential avoidance, negative strategies of cognitive emotion regulation, and emotional processing in people with general anxiety disorder (GAD).

This was a semi-experimental research with experimental and control groups. A total of 45 patients with GAD were selected using the purposeful sampling method. One group received 8 sessions of mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy (one session per week), and another group received 15 sessions of tDCS (three sessions per week; each session was 20 min in F3/F4 with an intensity of 2 mA). All subjects in two treatment groups and one waitlist control group were evaluated before and after the treatment using an acceptance and action questionnaire, cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire, and emotional processing scale. The data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance and the Tukey test. The data were analyzed using the SPSS software, version 19. 

The results showed that tDCS and mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy are effective in experiential avoidance (F=98.53, η2=0.744), negative strategies for cognitive emotion regulation (F=102.26, η2=0.824), and emotional processing (F=121.26, η2=0.931) in people with GAD. There is no significant difference in the experiential avoidance variable (md=0.735, P=0.575) and emotional processing (md=0.731, P=0.134) between mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy and tDCS therapy; however, in the rumination subscale, only mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy treatment method has been effective in the variable of negative strategies of cognitive emotion regulation (md=4.63, P=0.008).

tDCS and mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy were both effective in improving GAD symptoms, but mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy had more effects on clients’ rumination. As a result, to control the negative strategies for cognitive emotion regulation, mindfulness meta-cognitive therapy has a better effect.