Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Couple Therapy on Marital Relationship Quality, Covert Relational Aggression and Emotional Divorce in Couples Seeking Divorce
Keywords:
Emotion-focused couple therapy, marital relationships quality, covert relational aggression, emotional divorce, couples seeking divorceAbstract
Objective:Couples seeking divorce face many challenges in their married life. Therefore, the aim of the present study was determine the effectiveness of emotion-focused couple therapy on marital relationships quality, covert relational aggression and emotional divorce in couples seeking divorce.
Methods and Materials: This study was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The study population was couples seeking divorce who referred to counseling centers of Varamin city in the spring of 2025 year, which from them 30 couples were selected through purposive sampling method and randomly assigned into two equal groups. The experimental group underwent 10 sessions of 90-minute emotion-focused couple therapy and during this period the control group remained on the waiting list. The instruments of the present research included the marital relationships quality scale (Zhang et al., 2013), covert relational aggression scale (Nelson and Carroll, 2006) and emotional divorce scale (Gottman, 1994). The data of this study were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance method in SPSS version 27 at a significant level of 0.05.
Findings: The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of all three variables of marital relationships quality, covert relational aggression and emotional divorce in couples seeking divorce. In the other words, emotion-focused couple therapy improved marital relationships quality and reduced covert relational aggression and emotional divorce in couples seeking divorce (P<0.001).
Conclusion: According to the results of this research, counselors and therapists can use emotion-focused couple therapy alongside other couple therapy methods to improve the characteristics of couples seeking divorce.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Asma Fooladi, Zahra Nourian, Farahnaz Jameinezhad (Author); Masoumeh Radaei; Mohammadreza Jalalian Sedaghati (Author)
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