Effectiveness of Group Therapy Based Performance Art on Improvement of Emotional Regulation and Reducing Symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Women Affected by Marital Infidelity

The hidden relationships outside the ma-rital relationship, called "marital infide-lity", are associated with severe psycholo-gical damage in the betrayed person. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of group therapy based on performance art on improving emotional regulation and reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress in women affected by wife's infidelity. The research design of this study was pre-test - post-test quasi-experimental method with control group model design. 30 betrayed women in Te-hran were selected by convenient sam-pling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (15 indi-viduals in each group).
While the experimental group received the group therapy based on performance art for 16 hours in two consecutive days (eight hours per day), the control group did not receive any intervention. All participants completed the Cognitive Em-otion Regulation Questionnaire designed by Garnefski et al (2002) and Post-Traum-atic Stress Questionnaire designed by Fua et al (1997) in the pretest, post-test and one month follow up period. The results of variance analysis show that comparing to the control group, women in the expe-rimental group had significantly higher scores in emotional regulation and lower scores in post-traumatic stress symptoms in post-test and follow up stages. The creative dimensions of the group therapy based on performance art provides a fertile ground for healing of affective and emot-ional damages caused by infidelity in betr-ayed women, since it creates a group env-ironment which facilitates the process of empathy, collaboration, and sharing of pe-rsonal problems.