Effectiveness of Compassion-focused Therapy (CFT) on Perfectionism and Psychological Well-being of Male High School Students

This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of Compassion-focused Therapy (CFT) on perfectionism and psychological well-being of male high school students. This quasi-experimental study was applied in nature and used a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The statistical population of the present study was all male students who were studying in high schools in Isfahan in the academic year 2022, and 30 of them were included in two groups namely experimental group (15 participants) and control group (15 participants) as the research sample. The tools used in the current research were the psychological welfare questionnaire by Reff (1980) and Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale questionnaire by Hewitt and Flett (1991) that all participants completed as the pretest. Then, the participants in the experimental group received the Compassion-focused Therapy protocol (Gilbert and Choden, 2014) during eight sessions and the control group did not receive any training, both groups were evaluated again in the posttest. Analysis of covariance in SPSS 22 was used to analyze the obtained data. The findings showed that the average scores of the experimental group in the posttest compared to the control group were at a lower level and the average scores of the experimental group in the posttest compared to the control group were at a higher level in psychological well-being. Based on this, the results of data analysis showed that Compassion-focused Therapy has a significant effect on all aspects of perfectionism and psychological well-being (p<0.01).