Comparing the effectiveness of acceptance-based behavior therapy to applied relaxation on worry and generalized anxiety disorder symptoms

Introduction: generalized anxiety disorder (gad) is associated with a diminished quality of life and co morbidity withother anxiety and mood disorders. acceptance-based behavior therapy (abbt) is a new treatment that introduced fortreatment of gad. the current study compared abbt to applied relaxation (ar) -the most utilized psychologicaltherapy for gad.materials and methods: thirty two women with gad who were referred from psychiatrics offices in isfahan city wererecruited to participate in the study. they were then administered the scid/cv. twenty four subjects who met thecriteria for gad were assigned to two groups (abbt and ar) randomly. the groups received similar medication. theabbt and ar participated in 12 weekly therapy sessions. the instruments used in the study at pre and post test includedthe generalized anxiety disorder-7 item scale (gad-7) and penn state worry questionnaire (pswq). the data wereanalyzed using the multivariate analysis of covariance (mancova).results: no significant differences were found between abbt and ar groups in anxiety symptoms and worry (p>0.05).conclusion: overall, based on the findings of this study, one can conclude that the acceptance-based behavior therapydoes not seem to be different from the applied relaxation therapy for treatment of generalized anxiety disorder