comparing the effectiveness of schema therapy with acceptance and commitment therapy on cognitive avoidance in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Objective: this study aimed to compare the effectiveness of schema therapy with acceptance and commitment therapy (act) using exposure techniques on cognitive avoidance in female patients with generalized anxiety disorder. methods: a total of 10 women with generalized anxiety disorder were selected through purposeful sampling with structured clinical interview for dsm disorders (scid-5). to determine the absence of personality disorder, millon’s clinical multiaxial inventory (mcmi-iii) (millon and groosman, 2005) was used. schema therapy was conducted for 20 weekly sessions and act with exposure techniques for 12 weeks and follow-up for 6 weeks. the cognitive avoidance questionnaire (caq) (sexton and douglas, 2004) was used as a pretest and posttest to follow up on the results. analysis of variance with repeated measures was used to test the research hypotheses. results: the results showed that schema therapy is more effective than act in the subscales of thought suppression (f=12.80, p=0.037) and avoidance of threatening (f=25.61, p=0.015), but they have no significant statistical difference in other subscales and total score. both treatments significantly reduced the total score of cognitive avoidance, but they lacked a statistically significant difference. conclusion: schema therapy and act with exposure techniques are effective in reducing the severity of symptoms and improving cognitive avoidance in females with generalized anxiety disorder.