Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

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Omidi M, Ghasemzadeh S, Dehghan H. Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Training on Metacognitive Beliefs and Cognitive-Emotional Processing Deficit of Students with Social Anxiety Disorder. MEJDS 2018; 8 :87-87
URL: http://jdisabilstud.org/article-1-807-en.html

Background and Objective: Social anxiety disorder is a vivid and continuous fear of being social ashamed situations or doing activities in the presence of others’ judgment. Social anxiety disorder is a chronic disorder with a gradual and early onset during adolescence, which leads to personal disabilities and distresses. The disorder is one of the most commonly occurring anxiety disorders characterized by persistent fears of social or functional situations. In the disorder persons fear from evaluation by others. The disorder significantly affects academic, social, family and personal performance as well as economic productivity of individuals, and puts sufferers at risk of major depression and low quality of life. Recently, researchers have discovered probable keys of mental processes participate in the disease vulnerability and factors that cause progress of the disorder. One of these mental processes is cognitive approaches such as cognitive-emotional deficit. Thus, aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment training on metacognitive beliefs and cognitive-emotional processing deficit of students with social anxiety disorder.
Methods: The study was conducted with a semi-experimental design (pre-test/post-test) with a control group. Statistical population of the study consisted of 850 male and female students at Payame Noor University of Chabahar (Southeast of Iran). Sampling process was carried out in two stages: A) from each college, a classroom selected in a single stage cluster sampling and social anxiety questionnaire was given to the students; they were asked to answer to the questions thoroughly. B) Of the 80 subjects who achieved scores more than 20 in the Connor et al. social anxiety questionnaire, 36 subjects were selected and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (18 subjects in the control group and 18 subjects in the experimental group). In addition to social anxiety questionnaire, emotional processing scale and cognitive deficit questionnaire were used for collecting raw data. The collected data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of variance (MANCOVA).
Results: Results showed that, after eliminating the pre-test effect in the experimental group, there was a significant difference between mean scores of two groups in all components of cognitive processing deficit, for example in distraction (p<0.001), memory insufficiency (p<0.001) and inaccurate errors (p<0.001). There was no significant difference between mean scores of two groups in components of metacognition. According to other finding of the study, and after eliminating the pre-test effect in the experimental group, there was a significant difference between mean scores of two groups in the emotional processing deficit components, for example in emotion detection (p<0.001), emotional description (p<0.001) and thought externalizing (p<0.001). Therefore, considering the mean and standard deviation in the experimental and control groups in the pre-test and post-test, as well as the significance level and the Eta-square of studied variables, it could be asserted that acceptance and commitment training has been effective in decrease of cognitive-emotional deficit process and increase emotional process (p<0.001). While there was no significant difference between two groups in any metacognitive components .
Conclusions: It is apparent that social anxiety brings on avoidance of social interactions and reduce or impairs people’s social function. Thus, when social anxious people try to use their cognitive or emotional skills or try to have a proper social interaction, the high levels of anxiety weaken or disrupt their function. The main purpose of the acceptance and commitment training is to create a mental flexibility. That is the ability to make practical choices among the various choices that are more appropriate, not a behavior as if the person wants to avoid thoughts, feelings, memories or disturbing tendencies.