Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on the Emotional Expression and Sexual Function in Infertile Women’sAbstract

The present study was to investigate the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy in the context of infertile women’s emotional expression and sexual function. The study was a quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest and control group design, with a two-month follow-up period. The statistical population included infertile women who submitted referrals to the infertility clinics at Mother and Child Hospital and Samar infertility clinic in Shiraz during the winter of 2021. The experimental and control groups were randomly assigned to 36 infertile women who were selected through the voluntary sampling procedure. Over the course of two and a half months, the experimental group was subjected to ten sessions of acceptance and commitment therapy. In this study, the Emotional Expression Questionnaire (EEQ) (King, Emmons, 1990) and the Sexual Function Questionnaire (Keraskian, Mojembari, and Kaiballah, 2014) were implemented. The SPSS23 software was used to analyze the collected data using mixed ANOVA. The findings indicated that acceptance and commitment therapy has a substantial impact on the emotional expression and sexual function of infertile women (p<0.001). Through the development of psychological resilience and mental acceptance, acceptance and commitment therapy can be employed as an effective approach to enhance the emotional expression and sexual function of infertile women, as indicated by the study’s results.