Effectiveness of Positive Psychotherapy on inefficient attitudes of female students with Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Abstract

The present study was conducted aiming to investigate the effectiveness of positivist psychotherapy on inefficient attitudes in female students with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest design and a control group. The statistical population of the current study consisted of the female 12 to 15 years old students with GAD in Ahvaz City in academic 2018-2019 year. 30 female students with GAD who were selected through randomized cluster sampling method and they were randomly accommodated into experiment and control group (15 students in the experiment and 15 in the control group). The experiment group received positivist psychotherapy intervention (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) during two-and-a-half months in ten 75-minutes sessions. The applied questionnaires in this study included Wiseman and Beck's Inefficient Attitudes Questionnaire (IAS) and Spitzer et.al's Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire (GADQ). The data from the study were analyzed through MANCOVA method by SPSS23 statistical software. The results showed that positive psychotherapy has significant effect on ineffective attitudes in female students with GAD (p<0.001). Thus, this treatment has been able to reduce dysfunctional attitudes and its dimensions in female students with GAD. Findings of the present study revealed that the positive psychotherapy can be used as an efficient therapy to decrease inefficient attitudes in the students with GAD through employing techniques such as knowing personal abilities and concentrating on positive emotions.