Comparison of the Effectiveness of Emotionally Focused Couple’s Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Couple’s Therapy and Gottman Systemic-Cognitive Couple’s Therapy on Affect Balance and Inefficient Expectations of Woman with Sexual Dysfunction

Introduction: Sexual dysfunction is often associated with affect imbalance and inefficient expectations. The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of emotionally focused couple’s therapy, cognitive-behavioral couple’s therapy and Gottman systemic-cognitive couple’s therapy on affect balance and marriage expectations of woman with sexual dysfunction. Methods: This research was a semi-experimental study with a pretest, posttest and two months follow up design with a control group. The statistical population included all woman with sexual dysfunction and their spouses in fall 2021. From them, 72 couples were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to three experimental groups and a control group (18 couples for each group). affect balance scale of Diener et al and marriage expectations scale of Jones and Nelson was used to assess dependent variable in three stages. The three treatment groups were each treated for 8 sessions of 90 minutes and the control group did not receive any treatment. The data were analyzed by repeated measure analysis of variance and post-hoc Bonferroni test by version 26 of SPSS software. Results: The results showed that, in the post-test and follow up phases, in affect balance, there is a significant difference between emotionally focused therapy (-6.05 & 5.83), cognitive-behavioral therapy (-6.89 & -6.67) and systemic-cognitive therapy (-6.28 & -6.05) with the control group (-9.83 & -9.83), and also in marriage expectations there is significant difference between three treatment in posttest (emotionally focused therapy 34.38, 30 & 13.44, cognitive-behavioral therapy 32.83, 30.61 & 14.83, and systemic-cognitive therapy 33.72, 30 & 13.39) and follow up (emotionally focused therapy 34.44, 29.83 & 13.33, cognitive-behavioral therapy 33.05, 30.33 & 14.78, and systemic-cognitive therapy 33.89, 29.94 & 13.39) and the control group (p­<0.01). There was no significant difference between three treatments with each other in affect balance and inefficient expectations (p>0.05). Conclusion: According to the research results, emotionally focused, cognitive-behavioral and systemic-cognitive couple’s therapy are effective in increasing affect balance and realistic expectations, and in reducing idealistic and optimistic expectations in women with sexual dysfunction. It is recommended that these three treatments be used for women with sexual dysfunction in therapeutic centers.