Effectiveness of Teaching Skills Based on Schema Therapy on the Distress Tolerance and Psychological Flexibility of Female Students with Early Maladaptive Schema

Abstract

Early maladaptive schemas can impair people's mental, cognitive, and emotional health. Accordingly, the present study was conducted with the purpose of investigating the effectiveness of teaching skills based on schema therapy on the distress tolerance and psychological flexibility of female students with early maladaptive schema. The present study was experimental with a pretest, posttest, control group, and two-month follow-up period design. The statistical population of the present study included secondary high school female students with early maladaptive schema in the city of Isfahan in the academic year 2019-20. 30 female students with early maladaptive schema were selected through the available sampling method and randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups (each group of 15 adolescents). The experimental group received eight seventy-five-minute sessions of teaching skills based on schema therapy intervention for one month (Sayyadi et.al, 2017). Two students from the experimental group and two from the control group withdrew from the study. The applied questionnaires in the current study included the early maladaptive schema Questionnaire (Young, 1998), the distress tolerance Questionnaire (Simons, Gaher, 2005), and the psychological flexibility Questionnaire (Dennis, Vander Wal, 2010). The data taken from the study were analyzed via the repeated measurement ANOVA method through SPSS23 software. The results showed that teaching skills based on schema therapy has a significant effect on the distress tolerance and psychological flexibility of the female adolescents with early maladaptive schema (p<0.001). According to the findings of the present study, it can be concluded that teaching skills based on schema therapy can be applied as an efficient therapy to increase distress tolerance and psychological flexibility of female adolescents with early maladaptive schema.

Keywords

• psychological flexibility
• distress tolerance
• early maladaptive schema
• schema therapy
• female students