Effectiveness of Metacognitive Therapy on Dysfunctional Beliefs, Inflated Sense of Responsibility, and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy on dysfunctional beliefs, inflated sense of responsibility, and intolerance of uncertainty in patients with obsessive compulsive-disorder (OCD). The design used in the present study is semi-experimental, pretest-posttest with control group and a tree-month follow-up stage. The statistical population consisted of all patients with OCD in Mahallat, a city located in Markazi province, Iran in 2018. The participants first screened by using inclusion and exclusion criteria. Then sixteen patients with OCD selected as the sample of the study through available sampling method and assigned randomly into two groups: one experimental group and one control group (eight patients in each group). Each participant in the experimental group received 12 treatment sessions according to Well's metacognitive therapy method for OCD. The participants were measured both before and after interventions as well as three months later in the follow-up phase by the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Yale-BOCS; Goodman, 1989), the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire (OBQ-44; OCCWG, 2005), the Salkovskis Responsibility Attitude Scale (RAS; Salkovskis, 2000) and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS; Feriston, 1994). Data analyzed by multivariate co-variance analysis. The results indicated that metacognitive therapy had a significant effect on reducing dysfunctional beliefs, the inflated sense of responsibility and the variable intolerance of uncertainty (p˂0.050), and its effect remained three months after treatment (p˂0.050). The findings of the study support the effect of metacognitive therapy in improving the dysfunctional beliefs, inflated sense of responsibility and uncertainty of intolerance in patients with OCD.