the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on the psychological symptoms of students with social anxiety disorder: a randomized clinical trial

Introduction: social anxiety is a prevalent disorder among university students which interferes with their functions. mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is one of the new approaches for treating psychological disorders. this research aims to study the effectiveness of group mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in university students suffering from social anxiety. method: the design of this study was quasi-experimental with pretest, posttest and follow-up assessments for control and intervention groups. for this purpose, 24 students diagnosed with social anxiety were randomly allocated to control and intervention groups. the intervention group received 8 sessions of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. the students completed the social interaction anxiety scale (sias), interpersonal sensitivity measure (ipsm) and the self-compassion scale (scs) in both pretest and posttest. follow-up assessments were done after 2 months. the data were analyzed using spss. results: according to the findings of the present study, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy reduces social anxiety and interpersonal sensitivity significantly. also, it can increase the components of self-compassion significantly in the intervention group compared to the control group. conclusion: due to the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in reducing social anxiety in students, considering and utilizing this kind of psychotherapy is of great importance.