The effectiveness of metacognitive therapy and emotion-focused therapy in improving thought fusions and stop signals in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder

It has been shown that metacognition therapy (MCT) is effective on thought fusions and stop signals, but there has been no research on emotion-focused therapy (EFT) on these variables, so this research aims to compare the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy and emotion-focused therapy in improving the symptoms of stop signals and thought fusion in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD(. This study utilized a quasi-experimental design with pre-and post-tests and a two-month follow-up period. The participants were evaluated using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 (SCID-5), Yale-Brown, and a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist’s diagnosis. They were randomly assigned to groups. Each group began with 16 individuals. Moreover, Wells’ thought fusion Instrument and Myers’ stop signals questionnaire were employed in this research. The results indicated that in terms of thought fusion, the mean difference between the MCT group and the control group (-17.440) was greater than the mean difference between the EFT group and the control group (-15.059), and the mean difference between the MCT group and the control group (-9.29) was greater than the mean difference between the EFT group and the control group (-7.071) in stop signals. The mean difference between the two treatments and the control group demonstrated that MCT is more effective than EFT at reducing the specified components.