Effectiveness of group-base acceptance and commitment therapy on mindfulness and acceptance in mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders

Background and objective: Psychological distress is a general term used to describe unpleasant feeling. In other words, it is a mental illness that interferes with activities of daily person. Mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder often experience severe difficulties and stress. In order to limit excessive clinical referrals to specialist psychological services and rehabilitation, there is a need to identify alternative psychological treatments. Having children with autism spectrum disorder is a cause of stress for mothers and affect their emotions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is thought to help individuals to accept feeling as feeling and thoughts as thoughts. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of group-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on mindfulness and acceptance in mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders.

Methods: This is a multiple time series pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental study. Random sampling was used to recruit 30 mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders under auspices of Iranian Welfare Organization in Isfahan-Iran in autumn 2015. The participants were randomly assigned experiment and control groups in equal numbers. The experimental group received Acceptance and Commitment therapy for 8 sessions of 90 minutes. The research instruments were five facet Mindfulness Questionnaire developed by Baer et al. (2006) and Acceptance and Action Questionnaire developed by Bond et al. (2011). Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the data.

Results: The results showed significant differences between the control and experimental groups in all facet of mindfulness expect non-judgment and acceptance of mothers (p<0.05).

Conclusion: It can be concluded that commitment based therapy affects mindfulness, observation, description and lack of response not only in the post-test but also at follow-up tests. Therefore, this method can be used to raise mindfulness and acceptance of mothers having children with an autism spectrum disorder.