Background & Objectives : Social phobia is one of the common anxiety disorders characterized by fear of social situations, shame and embarrassment in communicating with unfamiliar people. The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy in reducing anxiety and depression in students with social phobia .

  Methods: An experimental pretest-posttest with control group design was used to conduct the study. The population consists of all female students in Ardabil city, 2013-2014 academic years. Using a multiple-stage cluster sampling method, a representative sample consists of 400 students was selected for the study. Then, among the students those with social phobia (based on the cut-off point), 34 participants were randomly selected and divided into two groups of 17 people (one experimental group and one control group) . The participants in experimental group received acceptance and commitment therapy for 10 sessions of 90 minutes. The control group did not receive any intervention. Anxiety, depression and social phobia questionnaires were administered to the two groups before and after the intervention. Descriptive statistics and multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) were used for data analysis.

  Results: The results of data analysis showed that treatment based on acceptance and commitment therapy reduces anxiety, depression and social phobia of students in the experimental group compared with the control group (p<0.001) .

  Conclusion: The present study showed that acceptance and commitment therapy for students with social phobia can be used as a psychological intervention along with other intervention mechanisms.

  Background & objectives: Patients with bulimia nervosa may have impaired mental image of their body and fear of weight gain. The aim of current research is study the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on improving body image of female students with bulimia nervosa.

  Methods: The design of current study is as quasi-experiment research with pre-test and post-test with control group . Statistical population consists all 12-16 years old female students with bulimia nervosa of Ardabil city in the 2013-13 academic years. In order to select the sample, at first 400 students were selected by multi stage cluster sampling method. Then between the students with bulimia nervosa, 40 subjects were selected randomly and were put in two experimental and control groups. The experimental group participated in 8 sessions of acceptance and commitment based training. Thecontrol group received no intervention. The gathered data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA).

  Results: The results show that acceptance and commitment therapy improved body image and reduced the symptoms of bulimia nervosa subjects of experimental group in comparison with the control group in the post-test (P<0.001).

Conclusions: The results indicated that acceptance and commitment therapy by therapeutic strategies, improved body image of female students with bulimia nervosa. Thus, interventions based on this approach in schools for students lead to decreasing the psychological problems