Effectiveness of Cognitive Rehabilitation Group Therapy on Verbal Memory, Stress Management and Alexithymia in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

Introduction: Traumatic brain injury is one of the significant causes of death and physical and psychological disability that can effect on verbal memory, stress management and alexithymia. As a result, present research aimed to determine the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation group therapy on verbal memory, stress management and alexithymia in patients with traumatic brain injury. Methods: The method of this study was a semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with experimental and control groups. The research population was patients with traumatic brain injury, referring to Birjand hospitals in the 2018 year. After studying the inclusion criteria, the number of 30 people was selected by the available sampling method and randomly replaced into two equal groups. , The experimental group, trained ten sessions (twice weekly) with the technique of cognitive rehabilitation group therapy, and the control group didn’t receive training. Research tools were verbal memory and stress management subscales and alexithymia scale. Data were analyzed using SPSS-22 software and by methods of Fisher, Chi-square, independent t, and multivariate analysis of covariance. Results: The findings showed that at the pre-test stage there was no significant difference between experimental and control groups in terms of verbal memory, stress management and alexithymia (P > 0.05), but at the post-test stage there was a significant difference in terms of all three variables (P < 0.05). In the other words, cognitive rehabilitation group therapy led to increase verbal memory (F = 137.905, P < 0.001) and stress management (F = 34.883, P < 0.001) and decrease alexithymia (F = 91.430, P < 0.001) in patients with traumatic brain injury. Conclusions: The results indicated the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation group therapy in improving verbal memory, stress management, and alexithymia in patients with traumatic brain injury. Therefore, therapists can use the method of cognitive rehabilitation group therapy to enhance psychological characteristics, especially increase verbal memory and stress management and decrease alexithymia.