Do People With Psychosis Have Specific Difficulties Regulating Emotions?

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Clinical Neuroscience

Background:

• Emotion regulation (ER) difficulties are common in psychotic disorders, but their specific nature and uniqueness compared to other mental health conditions remain unclear.
• Understanding these ER deficits is crucial for developing targeted therapeutic interventions for psychosis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether ER difficulties in psychosis are more pronounced in emotion modification or in emotion acceptance and tolerance.
• To determine if ER difficulties in psychosis affect various emotions (sadness, anxiety, anger, shame) uniformly.

Main Methods:

• Assessed ER skills in participants with psychotic disorders (n=37), depression (n=30), and healthy controls (n=28) using the Emotion Regulation Skill Questionnaire.
• The questionnaire measured the intensity of emotions and the skills used to manage them over the past week.

Main Results:

• Participants with psychosis demonstrated reduced skills in awareness, understanding, and acceptance of distressing emotions compared to healthy controls, with no significant difference in emotion modification skills.
• These ER differences in psychosis persisted even after controlling for comorbid depression.
• Participants with psychosis exhibited diminished ER skills across all assessed emotions, though only sadness intensity was significantly higher.

Conclusions:

• Psychosis is characterized by specific difficulties in utilizing ER skills related to awareness, understanding, and acceptance for managing anger, shame, anxiety, and sadness.
• These ER challenges are not exclusive to psychosis but represent a significant and promising target for psychological interventions.
• Further development of interventions specifically designed to enhance awareness, understanding, and acceptance of emotions is warranted for the psychological treatment of psychosis.