Investigation of the Effect of Compassion-Focused Therapy on Social Anxiety and Interpersonal Relationships among Women on an Overweight Diet 2019-2020

Background: Anxiety disorders are psychiatric illnesses that are most common in developing countries. Obesity is thought to be a risk factor for anxiety and intimate relationship disorders. The aim of the present paper was to investigate the effect of compassion-focused therapy on social anxiety and interpersonal relationships among women on an overweight diet 2019-2020. Methods: The study research design was quasi-experimental with a control group, pre-test, and post-test. We narrowed down 100 women according to the inclusion criteria; among them, we randomly selected 30 women on an overweight diet referring to the diet therapy clinics in Tehran province from December 2019 to April 2020. Afterwards, they were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group (n=15) was treated with compassion-focused therapy for ten weekly 90-minute sessions while the control group (n=15) did not receive any treatment. At the start of the study, after 10 weeks, all participants were tested using the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) and the Revised Communication Skills Questionnaire (RCSQ) methods. In addition to descriptive statistics, we used Chi-squared, independent, and dependent t tests to interpret the results; we employed the SPSS-25 program for all the analyses. Results: According to Mean±SD, there was a significant difference between the experimental (1.41±0.03) and control (2.01±0.43) groups regarding social anxiety and regarding interpersonal relationships there was a significant difference between the experimental (2.50±0.21) and control (1.83±0.21) groups, respectively. The experimental group had significantly lower posttest scores in terms of social anxiety (P=0.04) and interpersonal relationships (P=0.001). Moreover, there was a significant change in the experimental group from the pre-test to the post-test concerning all components of social anxiety (P=0.001) and interpersonal relationships (P=0.001). Conclusion: The findings showed that compassion-focused therapy could help with overweightness. Therefore, this intervention program is recommended for preventing social anxiety and interpersonal relationships among women on an overweight diet.