Effectiveness of compassion focused group counseling on emotion regulation strategies and marital satisfaction of betrayal women with cyber infidelity

With the extension of technology and cyberspace, facilitating communication and marital infidelity has become a threat to the family, which can make difficulties in marital satisfaction and couples' emotions. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of compassion focused group counseling on emotion regulation strategies and marital satisfaction of betrayal women with cyber infidelity. The research method was Semi-experimental, with pre-test, post-test, and follow-up and control group. The study population was all married women referred to "Tolou" Consulting Center in Harsin city in 2018 year, which Twenty-four of them were selected in a purposeful way after controlling the entrance and exit criteria, and randomly assigned to two 12-member experimental and control group. The research tools in this study were Hudson's (1992) marital satisfaction scale and Granefski et al (2002) emotion regulation strategies. Also compassion focused session, presented to the experimental group in 90 minutes 12 sessions. To investigate the research hypotheses, the descriptive statistic and repeated measures analysis of variance in spss software used. findings showed that significant differences between two group in terms of marital satisfaction(F=11.84, 27.06) and adaptive(F=14.94,27.47) and non-adaptive(F=25.08,22.81) strategies for emotion regulation in posttest and follow-up, also the effect of stability over time (9.11,10.22,7.75) as well as interaction between time and therapeutic effect(6.32,25.08,19.12) was significant (p<0.05).The results indicate that compassion focused group counseling reduces non-adaptive emotional self-regulation strategies, and also increased adaptive strategies and marital satisfaction of women. Therefore, this approach can be used to improve the psychological characteristics of women involved in marital infidelity.