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

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.