Psychological and Autonomic Correlates of Emotion Dysregulation among Women in Substance Use Disorder Treatment

Abstract

Background: Emotion regulation is increasingly recognized as important for the prevention and treatment of substance use disorder (SUD). However, there is an identified lack of physiological indexes of emotion dysregulation in SUD treatment studies, critically needed to better understand the link between emotion regulation capacity (measured physiologically) and self-report health outcomes among individuals in SUD treatment. Objective: To examine the association between respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and self-report health outcomes among women in SUD treatment. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study based on baseline data from 217 women enrolled in a randomized control trial to study a mind-body intervention as an adjunct to SUD treatment. All participants were enrolled in community-based outpatient treatment. Participants were administered questionnaires to examine sample characteristics, mental health symptoms, and interoceptive awareness and mindfulness skills. RSA data was gathered as an index of emotion dysregulation. Descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and regression were used in the analyses. Results: Findings highlight the extensive trauma histories, low SES, and the high symptoms of distress in this sample. RSA was only significantly correlated with interoceptive awareness after controlling for age and BMI. Measures of symptomatic distress and mindfulness were not correlated with RSA. Conclusions/Importance: Results provide the first evidence of RSA as an index of interoceptive awareness in this population. The inclusion of biomarkers such as RSA in SUD clinical studies may help identify individuals that are in need of targeted treatments that include interoceptive awareness training focused on improving emotion regulation.

Keywords:

• Substance use disorder
• emotion dysregulation
• women
• treatment
• psychophysiology
• interoceptive awareness

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the study participants, the research coordinators Sara Parent, Margaret O’Malley, and Danielle Shandera, and the Program Manager Susan Graham.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health under grant number R01DA033324. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.