Shenakht Journal of Psychology & Psychiatry

Introduction: One of the most common psychological disorders in the world today is depression, and it seems that one of the important components in developing or maintaining depression is the difficulty in regulating emotions.
Aim: The present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on emotion regulation difficulties in depressed people.
Methods: The method of the current research was semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test-follow-up design with a control group. The statistical population of this research consisted of all the patients diagnosed with depression who were referred to the Yara treatment clinic in 2022, and 30 of them were selected by the available sampling method and randomly assigned to two intervention and control groups. To measure the variables of the study, the Beck Depression Inventory (1961) and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale by Gratz & Roemer (2004) were used. The participants of the intervention group received 12 sessions of 60 to 180 minutes, of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. The data was analyzed by the method of analysis of variance with repeated measurements in SPSS software version 24.
Results: The results of the present study showed that the mean in the average scores of the components of emotion regulation difficulty in the pre-test-post-test and pre-test-follow-up stages is statistically significant (P<0.05), but the difference in the mean scores in the post-test-follow-up stages is not significant. P < 0.05).
Conclusion: The results of the present study showed that short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy leads to a reduction in the emotion regulation difficulty in patients with depression. The awareness of counselors, psychologists and other professionals about this treatment on emotion regulation processes and defense mechanisms in depressed patients can be helpful.