Effectiveness of Compassion Focused Therapy on the Positive/Negative Affect and Hope in Multiple Sclerosis Patients

As other chronic diseases the Multiple Sclerosis creates a number of harmful psychological effects on patients. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of the compassionfocused therapy on positive and negative affect and hope in multiple sclerosis (relapsing remitting) patients.

In a randomized controlled trial design a sample with 24 subjects were selected by available sampling method from a neurology clinic in Isfahan city in the winter 2016, and were randomly placed to experimental and control groups (n= 12). All subjects completed the positive and negative questionnaire and hope questionnaire in a pretest stage. Then experimental group received compassion focused therapy in eight 90 minutes sessions, whereas no intervention received by control group . Both groups were evaluated in the post-test and follow-up stages. The final dataset was analyzed by a repeated measure ANOVA analysis.

Data were shown significantly time effect (pre-test, posttest and the follow-up) ,as well as, time* group interaction effect for positive/negative affect and hope scores. A significant between subjects effects was also found for these variables. Hence the difference among the average scores was significant between two groups regardless of time passage.

The compassion focused therapy could be utilized to reduce negative affect and increase positive affect and hope in people who are suffered from multiple sclerosis and this treatment method is reasonable for patients of MS.