The Comparison of Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Therapy and Transcranial Direct Current Stmulation on Anxiety and Depression of Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of Emotion-focused therapy and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on anxiety and depression in heart patients in Tehran in 2019.

The research method is semi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design (three groups) with two experimental groups and one control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of all cardiac patients in Tehran, among whom 45 were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned in two experimental groups and one control group (15 people in each group). The Emotion-focused therapy experiment group was trained in nine 60-minute sessions and the Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation group received training during five 20-minute sessions, and the control group remained on the waiting list. The tools used in the present study included depression (Beck, Steer & Brown, 1996), and anxiety (Beck, Epstein, Brown & Esther, 1988) questionnaires, which were administered in two stages of pre-test and post-test. The analysis of data obtained from the implementation of the questionnaires were performed through SPSS-24 software in two descriptive and inferential sections (analysis of covariance).

The findings showed that both interventions used in this study could significantly decrease the anxiety and depression of heart patients (p <0.05), with a greater effect of emotion- focused therapy on anxiety and depression compared to Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. In addition, no significant difference was observed in the posttest and follow up phases (p <0.05), which indicates the stability of intervention changes.

According to the results of this study, the treatment of Emotion-focused therapy and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation are effective interventions in reducing anxiety and depression in heart patients, but Emotion-focused therapy was more effective.