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Traditional CBT engaged the individual to emphasize discrepancy-based processing, where as mindfulness-based therapy focus on 'accepting' and 'allowing what is' mode, without any kind of immediate emotional stress to change. Mindfulness based psychotherapies are working on deeper level, instead of clarifying each event into positive and negative, it allows to enhance the individual abilities to learn and observe their anxiety with kindness, curiosity and becomes relaxed with being anxious. Ten individuals diagnosed with coronavirus phobia were taken from OPD of CIIMHANS, Dewada, Chhattisgarh. Amongst these, five individuals were randomly distributed in experimental group (MBCT group) and control group (TAU group). Nature of the sample was purposive sampling. Outcome variables were measured by four scales, i.e., Fear of COVID-19, Perceived Vulnerability to Disease, HAM-A, and PGWBS. MBCT group was provided with the MBCBT therapy program. Therapeutic program consisted of approximately 16-22 sessions. Improvements were found after post treatment on fear intensity, perceived vulnerability to infectibility and germ aversion, anxiety level, and psychological general well-being measures. Significantly reduced fear intensity, perceived vulnerability, anxiety level, and positive general well-being was also evident over time from pre to follow. On conclusion, present study suggests that MBCT helps peoples with coronavirus phobia on developing higher anxiety tolerance, and emotional regulatory competencies to regulate irrational anxiety.
Keywords: discrepancy based processing, perceived vulnerability, mindfulness, allowing and accepting mode
Fear is an unpleasant, instinctive, universal and temporary human emotion. It is a kind of neurophysiological response which basically originated from stimulus response relation. Fear is a kind of attention seeking signal, it alerts one's mind to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological (Boscoboinik & Horáková, 2014; de Silva, 2018). Some physiological symptoms such as an increase in pulse rate, sensation of trembling, muscles stiffness, sweating, and shortness of breathing in the event of fear prepare the body to produce a response when in danger, but when it becomes irrational it creates attentional biases that further leads into several negative interpretations and attributional biases which develop disturbance in executive functioning's and other abstract thinking abilities of the person (Bayles et al., 2014; Dozois et al. 2019). Therefore, traditional CBT lonely cannot regulate heightened fear of COVID-19 in efficient ways. In this pandemic condition,...