Usefi, A. R. A., Khani, Z. O., & Moghadam, M. F. (2016). The Effect of Acceptance and Commitment Group Therapy on Body Image and Social Phobia in People with Physical Disabilities. Middle-Eastern Journal of Disability Studies, 7, e.13.
Background and objective: Health problems can have implications for mental illness or psychosomatic outcomes. The treatment of psychological problems along with physical disabilities could reduce pain. The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of acceptance and commitment group therapy on body image and social phobia in people with physical disabilities. Methods: The study population consisted of 200 patients under the auspices of Welfare Organization in Qom-Iran. Random sampling was used to recruit 30 male participants. The participants were assigned to control and experimental groups in equal numbers. The participants participated in eight training sessions, with each session lasting for 120-minutes. The research instruments were Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) developed by Connor and Body Image questionnaire developed by Brown, Cash, & Mikulka, (1990). Analysis of covariance was used to analyze the data.
Results: This is a pretest-posttest control group research. Results showed that the acceptance and commitment treatment led to an increase in acceptance and satisfaction of one’s own body (p<0.0001), and various parts of it (p<0.0001) except for weight. Acceptance and commitment therapy intervention group also had a significant effect on the subscales of fear (p<0.0001), avoidance (p< 0.001), Physiology (p<0.0001) and social phobia score (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: Acceptance and commitment therapy has a positive impact on improving body image and decreasing social phobia among people with physical disabilities,