Introduction: Infertility can sometimes affect women's personal and social abilities. On the other hand, the creation of physical, emotional and psychological tensions in the case of infertile women causes worries in these people. The aim of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment couple therapy with emotion-focused couple therapy on self-acceptance in infertile women.
Methods: The current research was a semi-experimental type with a pretest, posttest and follow-up design with a control group. The statistical population of this study included all infertile women aged 25 to 45 in Mashhad. Among them, according to the criteria for entering the research, 45 people who had obtained the minimum score from the questionnaires were selected according to their education and duration of infertility, and they were randomly divided into two groups (15 subjects were placed in the emotional couple therapy group and 15 subjects were in the acceptance and commitment couple therapy group) and a control group (15 subjects). After the pre-test, the subjects of the one experimental group received the acceptance and commitment couple therapy intervention and also the other experimental group received the emotion-focused couple therapy intervention for 8 therapeutic 90-minutes weekly sessions. The instruments used in this research was Chamberlain and Haaga's unconditional self-acceptance scale (2001). The obtained data from this research were analyzed using SPSS-27 software.
Results: The results showed that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of two groups of acceptance and commitment couple therapy and emotion-focused couple therapy in increasing the amount of unconditional self-acceptance in infertile women. Also, two groups have been effective, but in the stability of the results, the group who received the acceptance and commitment couple therapy intervention reported stable results in the follow-up. However, the group who received the emotion-focused couple therapy, despite the effectiveness and improvement of the mean scores of unconditional self-acceptance compared to the previous stage, the results have not been stable in the follow-up.
Conclusion: The findings showed that the acceptance and commitment couple therapy was more effective on the improvement of unconditional self-acceptance than emotion-focused couple therapy.