Effect acceptance and commitment couple therapy on marital distress, psychological flexibility and social concern in divorce applicant couples

Subject Areas : social psychology

Abolfazl Bakhshipour ¹ , Narges Shojaei KalateBali ² , Azita Behjat ³ , Asma Fooladi ^{4 *}

1 - Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Bojnourd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bojnourd, Iran
2 - PhD Student of Counselling, Department of Counselling, Bojnourd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bojnourd, Iran
3 - MA of Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychology, Yaza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Yazd, Iran
4 - Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Tabaran Institute of Higher Education, Mashhad, Iran

Received: 2020-01-31 Accepted : 2020-04-16 Published : 2020-05-21

Keywords: Psychological flexibility, social concern, couple therapy, acceptance and commitment, Marital distress,

Abstract :

The aim of present research was determine the effect acceptance and commitment couple therapy on marital distress, psychological flexibility and social concern in divorce applicant couples. Research method was semi-experimental with pretest-post-test design with experimental and control groups. Research population was divorce applicant couples referred to counseling center of Qarchak city in 2018 year. From population 40 couples were by available sampling method and randomly replaced into two equal groups including the experimental and control groups. The experimental group received training of acceptance and commitment couple therapy for 12 sessions of 2 hours (one session per week) and control group didn’t receive any training. Data were collected by questionnaires of marital distress (Snyder, 1997), psychological flexibility (Bond & et al, 2007) and social concern (Wells, 1994) and analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance method in SPSS-17 software. Results showed that the acceptance and commitment couple therapy method led to decrease marital distress and social concern and increase psychological flexibility in divorce applicant couples (P<0/001). Based on the results it is recommended that family counselors and therapists use from method of acceptance and commitment couple therapy along with other methods to improve the problems of divorce applicant couples, especially decreasing marital distress and social concern and increasing psychological flexibility.