The Effectiveness of Schema-oriented Mindfulness on the Social Anxiety Symptoms and Experiential Avoidance in Gifted Female Students with social anxiety

Gifted students suffer from psychological damage caused by heavy academic load.The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of Schema-oriented Mindfulness intervention on the social anxiety symptoms and experiential avoidance in gifted female students with social anxiety.

The research method was experimental with pre-test-post-test design with a control group and a one-month follow-up. For this purpose, among the 14 to 18 years old gifted female students with social anxiety in the academic year of 2022-2023 in the Isfahan city, who were identified based on the La Greca’s Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescent; 38 persons were selected by purposeful sampling and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups (19 person in each group). The experimental group received 8 sessions of 90 minutes per week of Schema-oriented Mindfulness but the control group did not receive any intervention until the end of the study. The students completed La Greca’s Adolescent Social Anxiety Scale and Gamez’s Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire in three stages: pre-test, post-test and follow-up. The data were analyzed by the analysis of variance with repeated measurements method.

The results of data analysis showed that Schema-oriented Mindfulness has a significant effect on reducing social anxiety and experiential avoidance in the post-test and follow-up stages (p< 0.001).

According to the results of this research, Schema-oriented Mindfulness intervention can be used to reduce the symptoms of social anxiety and experiential avoidance in gifted adolescents.