The effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy on cognitive flexibility and distress tolerance married women with social anxiety disorder

Background: It seems that considering the role of emotions in distress tolerance and cognitive flexibility as two important dimensions of social anxiety disorder, which is one of the most debilitating anxiety disorders, using treatments that target emotions can be helpful. Aims: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy on cognitive flexibility and distress tolerance married women with social anxiety disorder. Methods: The research method was a semi-experimental pretest-posttest design with a 45-day follow-up strage by control group. The study population included all married women with social anxiety disorder referred to psychological counseling centers in the 18th district of Tehran in 2023 which among those 34 cases were selected through available sampling and according to the inclusion criteria and they were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The Experimental group received emotion-focused therapy (Johnsano, 2008) sessions for nine 90-minutes sessions. All participants were assessed by the questionnaires of cognitive flexibility Inventory (Dennis & Vander Wal, 2010) and distress tolerance (Simons & Gaher, 2005). Data were analyzed by SPSS-24 software and MANOVA with repeated measure test. Results: The results indicated the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy on improving cognitive flexibility and distress tolerance (p< 0.01) and maintaining its effectiveness in the follow-up stage (p< 0.01). Conclusion: Considering to the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy it is suggested to focus on this therapy as one of the auxiliary, supportive and rehabilitation therapy along with drug treatment in reducing the consequences of difficulties in distress tolerance and cognitive flexibility.