The Effectiveness of Schema Therapy on Reducing Neuroticism

Studies have shown that neuroticism is one of the personality traits associated with negative psychological consequences. This research was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of schema therapy on reducing neuroticism. The current research is a quasi-experimental type with a pre-test-post-test design and a control group. The research population was the patients referred to Shariati Hospital in Tehran in 2021, and 22 of them who had obtained a high score in the neuroticism subscale were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned into two experimental (n = 11) and control (n = 11) groups. Both groups completed the neuroticism subscale of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory-3 (NEO-FFI-3) in the pre-test and post-test phases. The experimental group was subjected to the schema therapy for 10 weekly sessions, but no intervention was performed on the experimental group during this period. The analysis of the collected data was done with analysis of covariance and SPSS-18 software. The obtained findings showed that schema therapy was able to significantly reduce the level of neuroticism in the experimental group compared to the control group (P < 0.001). According to the findings, it can be concluded that schema therapy is effective in reducing neuroticism and can be used in treatment centers in this regard.