Armaghane Danesh Bimonthly Journal (Jul 2019)
The Effectiveness of Metacognitive Therapy in a Group Method on Metacognitive Beliefs in Female Students with Social Anxiety Disorder
Abstract
Abstract Background & aim: Social anxiety, also known as social phobia, is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in the society, which, due to the complex and multidimensional nature of this disorder, requires the planning and implementation of appropriate treatment. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Wells meta-cognitive therapy in group therapy on meta-cognitive beliefs of female students with social anxiety disorder. Methods: the present quasi-experimental study was carried out using a pre-test one-month post-test and control group. The statistical population of the present study were female undergraduate students of Azad University, Payam Noor University, and Applied Sciences University in Gachsaran, Iran. The study was conducted on 300 students using Social Anxiety Inventory(SPI). The cut point was 40 with the accuracy of 80% and cut point of 50 with the accuracy of 89%, distinguished people with social anxiety from non-specific individuals. At that point, sixty participants were randomly selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups of 30 participants each. The MCQ-30 metacognitive beliefs questionnaire was performed in three stages: pre-test, post-test and one-month follow up for the groups. After carrying out ethical considerations(informed consent, willingness, secrecy), the experimental group received metacognitive therapy during the ten sessions and the control group received no treatment. The obtained results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and multivariate covariance analysis(MANCOVA) using SPSS software version 21. Result: Mean and standard deviation of metacognitive beliefs in pretest; experimental group 08, 89, 26, 6, control group 90.22, 5.58, posttest 70.04, 4.66, control group 84.63, 6.79 and follow-up in experimental group 71.38, 6.79 and control group 85.74, 6.94. Furthermore, the results of analysis of covariance indicated that there was a significant difference between the two groups in all post-tests(p<0.05). According to the descriptive indices, the experimental group's post-test scores were significantly lower than the control group. This was also the case for the components of follow-up research, therefore group metacognitive therapy significantly improved the metacognitive beliefs of patients with social anxiety at post-test and the consistency of treatment outcomes at follow-up. Conclusion: Results showed improvement in patients' symptoms after one month post-test and follow-up. According to the post-test results, it appeared that meta-cognitive group therapy was effective in improving metacognitive beliefs in patients with social phobia disorder.
