The impact of emotion regulation therapy on emotion differentiation in psychologically distressed caregivers of cancer patients

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives

Emotion differentiation is considered adaptive because differentiated emotional experiences are believed to promote access to the information that emotions carry, enabling context-appropriate emotion regulation. In the present study, secondary analyses from a recent randomized controlled trial (O’Toole et al., 2019) were conducted to investigate whether emotion differentiation can improve as a result of psychotherapy and whether improvements in emotion differentiation are associated with reduced distress.

Design and methods

A total of 81 distressed caregivers of cancer patients were randomized to Emotion Regulation Therapy (ERT), an intervention aimed at improving emotion differentiation and facilitating healthy emotion regulation, or a waitlist condition. Emotion differentiation scores could be calculated for 54 caregivers.

Results

Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that ERT led to significant improvements in negative (η² = 0.21, p = .012), but not positive emotion differentiation (η² = <0.01, p = .973). Correlation analyses showed that improvements in negative emotion differentiation were not associated with changes in distress.

Conclusions

The results suggest that negative emotion differentiation can improve as a result of psychotherapy. Further research is needed to clarify how improvements in emotion differentiation following therapeutic interventions relate to treatment outcomes such as distress.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02322905.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotion differentiation
• caregiver
• cancer
• emotion regulation therapy

Data availability

https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8D9QC

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Fresco was supported by NHLBI under Grant R01HL119977, NCCIH under Grant R61AT009867, NIMH under Grant R01MH118218, and NICHD under Grant R21HD095099. Dr. O’Toole and Dr. Mikkelsen were supported by the Danish Cancer Society under grants R119-A7545 and R96-A6385.