Investigating and Comparing the Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions and Acceptance and Commitment on Social Anxiety: Meta-Analysis

People with social anxiety face problems in many personal and social fields, including interpersonal relationships, due to the anxiety caused by being in social situations. Therefore, experts try to reduce its effects by performing psychological interventions. Accordingly, in this research, a meta-analysis comparison of the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) interventions on social anxiety was considered to investigate the real effect of these interventions.

Methods and Materials:

 For this purpose, among the many research related to this topic, 68 research (31 ACT and 37 CBT research) were found in reliable databases such as Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc), Iranian publications (Magiran), Comprehensive Portal of Human Sciences, Scientific information database (SID), PubMed, Islamic world science citation (ISC) and science journals and conference proceedings publisher (Civilica) were selected and meta-analysis was done on them. This research is based on 68 effect sizes and the tool used was the meta-analysis checklist. Data were analyzed using CMA-3 software.

The research findings showed that the effect size of interventions and training based on acceptance and commitment therapy on social anxiety was 0.603 (P <.001) and for cognitive-behavioral interventions was 0.635 (P <.001).

The obtained effect size in terms of r value for psychological interventions (ACT and CBT) on social anxiety is high, so it can be said that both psychological interventions can effectively reduce social anxiety, but according to the results, obtained effect size is higher for cognitive-behavioral therapy compared to acceptance and commitment therapy.