The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on prisoners' psychological capital and criminal thinking in Bushehr city

Psychological empowerment of prisoners is one of the effective treatment programs for reducing the prevention of recurrence of crime. Due to the importance of this issue, the present study was conducted with the aim of the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on the psychological capital and criminal thinking of prisoners in Bushehr city. The method of the present study was quasi-experimental and its design was pre-experimental-post-experimental-follow-up after two-month with the control group. The statistical population of this study was 895 male prisoners in Bushehr Central Prison in 2020. Forty prisoners were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly divided into two groups of intervention and control using a lottery. The research instruments included the Psychological Capital Questionnaire; PCQ (Luthans et al., 2007), and Criminal Thinking Scales; CTS (Knight et al., 2006). After receiving the pretest, acceptance and commitment therapy was performed in 8 sessions of 90 minutes for the intervention group, and the control group was on the waiting list. Data analysis was performed using Repeated measures ANOVA tests in SPSS-20. The results of the Bonferroni Subordinate Test showed the scores of self-efficacy, and optimism in the intervention group in the post-test stage increased significantly (P<0.05); However, this incremental effect remained significant in the follow-up phase in the component of self-efficacy (P<0.05); The results also showed that the scores of criminal thinking in the experimental group decreased in the post-test and follow-up stages (P<0.05). From the above results, it can be concluded that acceptance and commitment therapy is an effective intervention in improving self-efficacy, optimism and reducing criminal thinking in prisoners.