Effectiveness of Meaning-centered Group Therapy and Mindfulness based Cognitive therapy in Cognitive flexibility in Patients with Breast Cancer

The present study aimed to compare effectiveness of meaning-centered group therapy with mindfulness based cognitive therapy in cognitive flexibilityamong patients with breast cancer. The research design was mixed. The study population included all patients with advanced breast cancer being treated at the Hematology and Oncology Research Center of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Using purposeful sampling,  24 patients were selected and were assigned in two groups of group meaning therapy  and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (12 subjects in each group). Group psychotherapy was conducted on both groups in two hour sessions for 8 weeks. A demographic questionnaire and Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI) were used for data collection. Data were analyzed by repeated measure analysis of variance method by SPSS 21 software. Both treatments had a significant effect on the cognitive flexibility in patients with breast cancer. Also, the study of the follow-up stage (after two months) showed that there was no significant difference between the post-test and the follow-up stage in the meaning centered therapy group, but this difference was significant in the mindfulness group. In addition, the groupmindfulness based cognitive therapy was more effective than meaning-centered group therapy.