Introduction: Anxiety disorders are among the widely-spread disorders that today, is in all parts of people’s lives. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a third-generation cognitive behavior therapy in treatment of anxiety disorders. Accordingly, the necessity of using teaching methods which are more effective is important. We aimed to determine the efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on emotional processing in anxious nurses.

Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study, in which pretest-posttest control group was used. Forty subjects completed the study; the study sample was randomly selected from nurses of Ardabil anxiety groups (mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) and were assigned to a waiting list. Anxiety questionnaire for data collection-trait mindfulness questionnaires and scales were used for emotional processing. Data analysis of variance was done with SPSS v. 16 software.

Results: Results showed that the mean scores of anxiety and emotional processing in the experimental group significantly decreased compared to the control group of (P < 0.01).

Conclusions: The results showed that training of knowledge-based cognitive therapy on anxiety and emotional processing was effective in nurses. Therefore, based on knowledge of cognitive therapy, training to improve nurses' anxiety and emotional processing should be taken into consideration.