Comparing the Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Emotion Self-Regulation and Attitudes toward Extramarital Relationships in Marginalized Infertile Women

Abstract

Introduction and Aim: Infertile women face many problems in their married life, and may disrupt their emotional self-regulation and increase the likelihood of having extramarital relationships. Therefore, this study was conducted with the aim of comparing the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy on emotional self-regulation and attitudes toward extramarital relationships in marginalized infertile women.

Methodology: This study was a quasi-experimental with a pre-test, post-test, and two-month follow-up design with a control group. The research population was infertile women referring to Dr. Elina Bayramzadeh's clinic (surgeon and specialist of gynecologist, obstetrics, and infertility) in the second half of 2024 year. Number of 45 infertile women were selected from 120 people using simple random sampling method and randomly by lottery assigned to three equal groups. Each of the experimental groups underwent 10 sessions of 90 minutes of intervention with emotion-focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, and the control group remained on the waiting list for training. The research instruments included the Affective Style Questionnaire (Hoffman & Kashdan, 2010) and Attitudes toward Infidelity Scale (Whatley, 2008), and the data were analyzed the methods of analysis of variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS-26 software.

Findings: The results of the present study showed that both methods of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy were effective in increasing emotional self-regulation and reducing attitudes toward extramarital relationships in marginalized infertile women, and the results were maintained at the follow-up stage (P<0.001). Also, the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy was greater than the cognitive behavioral therapy in increasing emotional self-regulation and reducing attitudes toward extramarital relationships in marginalized infertile women (P<0.001).

Conclusion: According to the results of this study, to increase emotional self-regulation and reduce attitudes toward extramarital relationships in vulnerable groups, including marginalized infertile women can be used the emotion-focused therapy.