فاطمه فاضلی ثانی

Objective: Psychological factors play a decisive role in the occurrence and experience of pain disorders. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy on alexithymia and difficulty in emotion regulation in patients with pain disorder. Method : The method of the present study was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design and control group and a two-month follow-up. The statistical population of the study included all women who were referred to Manoushan and Behsa counseling centers in Tehran with psychosomatic problems and pain. Sixty people from this population were selected and randomly divided into three groups (20 people in each group). Research instruments included the Toronto Emotional Dysfunction Scale (Bugby et al., 1994) and the Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) (Gertz & Roemer, 2004). One group received 12 one-hour sessions of emotion-focused therapy, and another group received 10 one-hour sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. However, the control group did not receive any intervention during the study. In addition to descriptive statistics, mixed variance analysis and Ben Foroni post hoc test were used to analyze the research data.   Results : The results for alexithymia showed that the emotionally focused therapy group had a significantly lower mean than the cognitive behavioral group (P= 0.02) and the control group (P 0.001), and the cognitive-behavioral group had a significantly higher mean compared to the control group (P = 0.001). Also, the results for the difficulty in emotion regulation showed that the emotionally focused group and the cognitive-behavioral group have significantly lower means compared to the control group (P = 0.001). Conclusions : The results of the present study, in addition to confirming the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy, indicated that emotion-focused therapy is a more effective treatment for alexithymia. As a result, emotion-focused therapy can be considered an effective treatment that can be used by health professionals to treat pain disorders.

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy on pain coping strategies and pain catastrophizing in patients with pain disorder. The research method was a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design and a control group and a two-month follow-up. The statistical population of the study included all women with psychosomatic problems and pain who referred to Manoushan and Behsa counseling centers in Tehran. The sample size included 60 (three groups of 20). The research instruments included the Rosenstile and Keefe (1983) Pain Coping Strategies Questionnaire and the Bishop and Pivik (1995) Pain Catastrophe Scale. the emotion-focused experimental group received 12 training sessions and the cognitive-behavioral experimental group received 10 sessions training, but the control group did not receive any intervention during the study.. The results of mixed variance analysis and Benferroni pairwise comparison test showed that both emotion-focused therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy have significant impact on the components of pain reinterpretation, pain catastrophizing, behavioral activity and coping efficiency (P <0.05), but they do not have significant effect on the components of return attention, ignoring pain, prayer and hope, and self-talking (P <0.05). The results also showed that both treatments have significant effect on pain catastrophizing (P <0.05). Also, no significant difference was observed between the two experimental groups (P <0.05). Therefore, the results of the present study show that emotion-focused therapy, like cognitive-behavioral therapy, can be used for patients with pain disorders and improve their cognitive factors.