Effectiveness of Emotion-Based Therapy on the Anxiety and Psychological Wellbeing of the Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

The chronic physiologic diseases such as diabetes cause psychological damages such as depression in the patients suffering from them. Therefore the present study was conducted aiming to investigate the effectiveness of emotion-based therapy on the anxiety and psychological wellbeing of the patients suffering from type 2 diabetes.

The research method of the present study was quasi-experimental in pretest, posttest type with control group and six-month follow-up stage. The statistical population of the study included all the patients with type 2 diabetes who referred to the physicians specialized in diabetes 2 in the city of Shiraz in 2019. 60 patients with type 2 diabetes were selected through purposive sampling method and they were randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups (each group of 30 patients). The patients in the experimental group received 14 emotion-based therapy sessions during three-and-a-half months. Anxiety questionnaire (Beck, 1988) and the questionnaire of psychological wellbeing (Ryff, 1996) were used in the present study. The data from the study were analyzed through repeated measurement ANOVA via SPSS23 statistical software.

The results showed that the emotion-based therapy has significant effect on the anxiety and psychological wellbeing of the patients with type 2 diabetes (p<0.001) in a way that this therapy succeeded in leading to the decrease of anxiety and the improvement of psychological wellbeing in these patients.

Considering the results of the present study, emotion-based therapy can be considered as an efficient therapy to decrease the depression of the patients with type 2 diabetes through concentrating on awareness and emotion management and the people’s awareness of emotional processes.