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Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
On what do therapists agree? Assessing therapist evaluations of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness
Matthew W Southward1,2, Anne C Wilson1,3, Jennifer S Cheavens1
1Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Objective:
To develop more unified, process-based, and disseminable psychotherapy treatments, it is important to determine whether there is consensus among therapists regarding intervention strategies.
Design:
Because emotion regulation is a cornerstone of modern treatments and a thriving area of clinical research, we assessed therapists' ratings of the effectiveness of commonly studied emotion regulation strategies.
Methods:
Therapists (n = 582) read eleven vignettes describing stressful scenarios and rated the effectiveness of ten emotion regulation strategies in each scenario.
Results:
Across therapists, we found general consensus regarding the most (i.e., problem-solving) and least (i.e., concealing emotions) effective strategies. Cognitive/behavioural/third-wave therapists rated acceptance and distraction as more effective, and emotional expression and gathering information as less effective, than other therapists, Fs> 4.20, ps < .05, whereas hours of clinical experience were generally unrelated to strategy effectiveness ratings.
Conclusions:
We discuss what these points of agreement and relative disagreement among therapists reveal about a more unified, process-based treatment approach and how these results can guide emotion regulation research.
Practitioner Points:
There is general consensus among practising therapists that problem-solving is the most effective emotion regulation strategy and expressive suppression is the least effective. However, CBT-oriented therapists rated acceptance and distraction as more effective than non-CBT-oriented therapists. Non-CBT-oriented therapists rated emotional expression and gathering information as more effective than CBT-oriented therapists. Years of experience were unrelated to ratings of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness.
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