The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Sense of Coherence, Emotional Processing, Death Anxiety, and Body Image in Breast Cancer Patients

Breast cancer, as the most common type of cancer in women, has profound effects on various aspects of patients’ performance; Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on sense of coherence, emotional processing, death anxiety, and body image in breast cancer patients. This research had a pretest-post-test quasi-experimental design with a control group. The research population consisted of breast cancer patients in Isfahan in 2022. From the aforementioned population, 30 patients were selected using purposive sampling and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The pre-test was conducted through the Sense of Cohesion Questionnaire (SOC-29), Emotional Processing Scale (EPS), Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), and the Multidimensional Questionnaire of Individual’s Attitude About Body Image (MBSR); the experimental group underwent eight 90-minute sessions of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. The control group received no intervention. After the intervention, the post-test was administered. The data were analyzed using covariance analysis with SPSS. The findings showed a significant difference between the sense of coherence (E=0.425, P=0.0001), emotional processing (E=0.451, P=0.0001), death anxiety (E=0.422, P=0.0001), and body image (E=0.507, P=0.0001) in the two groups in the post-test. This means that performing mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has increased the scores of coherence sense, emotional processing, and satisfaction from body image and decreased the scores of death anxiety (P>0.05). Mindfullness-based cognitive therapy can be used as an effective intervention to improve the sense of coherence, emotional processing, death anxiety, and body image of breast cancer patients.