Background: Mothers acting as primary caregivers for pediatric cancer patients experience profound psychological strain, which frequently manifests as severe anxiety, fear, guilt, and generalized emotional distress. This study aimed to compare the efficacy of compassion-focused therapy and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in improving emotion regulation among this vulnerable population.
Methods: A randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted, incorporating pretest, posttest, and three-month follow-up evaluations. The target population comprised mothers of children receiving oncological care at Mofid Children’s Hospital in Tehran, Iran during 2025. A total of 45 eligible participants were recruited through convenience sampling and randomly allocated into two experimental groups and one control group (n=15 per group). The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) was administered to assess emotion regulation. Participants in the experimental conditions completed eight weekly, 90-minute sessions of either compassion-focused therapy or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, whereas the control group received no therapeutic intervention. Statistical analyses were conducted via repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) using SPSS version 26.
Results: At pretest, mean cognitive reappraisal scores were similar across groups (M=15.55, SD=3.88). At posttest, these scores increased to 24.88 (SD=3.67) for the compassion-focused therapy group and 21.17 (SD=4.01) for the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy group. Regarding expressive suppression, overall pretest scores were 24.46 (SD=4.06), which decreased at posttest to 14.60 (SD=3.06) following compassion-focused therapy and 17.80 (SD=2.98) following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Notably, compassion-focused therapy demonstrated a significantly greater reduction in expressive suppression compared to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (mean change difference=-3.13, P=0.021). All therapeutic effects were sustained at the follow-up assessment.
Conclusions: Both compassion-focused therapy and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy are effective in enhancing emotion regulation among mothers of children with cancer. However, given its superior efficacy in mitigating expressive suppression, compassion-focused therapy emerges as a particularly valuable intervention for addressing emotion regulation difficulties within this population.