Comparison of the efficacy of emotional focused therapy with application art and emotional focused therapy on emotional expression among people having experienced love trauma syndrome

Love trauma syndrome is one of the most difficult and pervasive experiences in people's lives which makes it difficult for people to express their emotions. Numerous studies show that emotional-focused therapy is effective on emotional injuries, but so far no research has been conducted on the use of art application along with the emotional-focused and experiential therapies.

The present study aimed to compare the effectiveness of emotional-focused therapy with the art application and emotional-focused therapy on the emotional expression of people with love trauma syndrome.

The design of this research was semi-experimental and of pre-test-post-test type with control group and three-month follow-up. The population of the present study was the patients aged 25 to 45 years with love trauma syndrome referred to the psychological clinics of the 2nd district of Tehran, of which 51 people were selected by purposive sampling according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and randomly replaced into three groups of 17 people (two experimental groups and one control group). The measurement tool of this research were love trauma inventory Ross (1999) and the emotional expression questionnaire King and Emmons (1990). For the first group, emotional-focused therapy with art application and emotional-focused therapy were implemented in 12 sessions of 90 minutes, and no treatment was provided to the control group.To analyze the data, variance analysis with repeated measurements method was used.

The results indicated that emotional-focused therapy with art application and emotional focused therapy led increase emotional expression in pre-test-post-test and follow-up stages. Also, the results of Bonferroni's post hoc test showed a significant difference between the effect of emotional focused therapy with art application more effective than emotional focused therapy on positive emotion expression, intimacy and negative emotion expression (P>0/05).

According to the obtained results, it is concluded that art as a catalyst along with emotion-focused therapy through opening the right hemisphere, reaching the core of trauma, healthy expression of positive and negative emotions and acceptance of emotions has led to more effectiveness of emotion focused therapy.