Effectiveness of emotional schema therapy on death attitude and distress tolerance of breast cancer patients

 Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women, and despite medical advances and the development of treatments, this disease continues to cause psychological and physical effects on the life dimensions of many affected people, such as the attitude to death and tolerance of distress, which should be taken into account. Therefore, the aim of this research was the effectiveness of emotional schema therapy on attitude towards death and distress tolerance of breast cancer patients.

Methods and Materials: 

The research method is semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test design and follow-up with a control group. The statistical population included all patients diagnosed with breast cancer in government cancer treatment centers located in Isfahan. The sample consisted of 36 patients with breast cancer from Seyed al-Shohda Hospital (AS) in Isfahan and Alaa Cancer Prevention and Control Center, who were selected through targeted sampling and randomly divided into two experimental groups (18 people) and control groups (18 people). The experimental group was treated with emotional schema. The data in this research was collected The Death Attitude Profile (DAP-R) –Revised (Wang, Racker & Gasser,1994) and the Distress Tolerance Scale (DTS) by (Simons& Gaher, 2005), in three stages: pre-test, post-test and follow-up, and it was done using proportional statistical tests and SPSS-26 software.

The results of the analysis of variance with repeated measurements showed that emotional schema therapy improved the attitude towards death and distress tolerance of the experimental group at a significant level (P<0.05).

The results of the present study showed that the effectiveness of emotional schema therapy can have a significant impact on the psychological characteristics of breast cancer patients, including the attitude towards death and distress tolerance, so it is suggested that this type of treatment be used to help breast cancer patients.