Introduction: Being infected with HIV, followed by AIDS, is accompanied with a wide range of psychological factors such as emotional regulation and emotional schemas, in connection with which the compliance of patients with the disease is affected. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to compare the cognitive emotion regulation strategies and emotional schemas in people with HIV and normal people.

Methods: The study was causal-comparative, cross-sectional. The inclusion criteria were selected and measured by cognitive excitement and emotion regulation (Garnefski et al., 2004) and emotional schemas (Leahy, 2002) tools. After data collection, data analysis by SPSS-16 program and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was performed.

Results: Analyzing data using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) indicated that there were significant differences between the two groups in some subscales of cognitive emotion regulation (i.e. rumination (P = 0.001), putting into perspective (P = 0.003), and other-blame (P = 0.046) and emotional schemas (i.e. rumination (P = 0.001), emotional self-awareness (P = 0.001), uncontrollability (P = 0.0001), validation by others (P = 0.031), comprehensibility (P = 0.0001), blame (P = 0.0001), simplistic view of emotions (P = 0.049), higher values (P = 0.002), and acceptance of feelings (P = 0.0001). However, no significant difference was found between patients with HIV and normal controls in other subscales.

Conclusions: Considering the current results, addressing psychological aspects associated with HIV infection and particularly helping patients to improve their emotion regulation strategies and maladaptive emotional schemas is of great importance.