A Qualitative Study on Patients’ Use of Emotion Regulation Strategies During Therapeutic Relationships

Abstract

Introduction Emotion regulation may be an important tool that therapists and patients use to build and maintain therapeutic relationships. This exploratory study investigates how patients use intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies during interactions with occupational therapists and physiotherapists. Methods A two-staged qualitative study was conducted. In the first stage 11 patients were interviewed regarding their use of emotion regulation during their therapeutic relationships. In the second stage, 14 patient/therapist dyads were observed during the course of the therapeutic relationship and then interviewed individually at the end of the relationship. Results Patients utilise the full range of intrapersonal emotion regulation strategies that can be categorised in Gross’s (1998) process model of emotion regulation including situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive reappraisal and response modulation. They used interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to a lesser extent, only reporting using strategies that fit into one of the four interpersonal emotion regulation strategies identified Williams’ (2007), altering the situation. Conclusions This study makes an important contribution to research on patients’ contribution to therapeutic relationship development/maintenance. It is the first study to explore patients use of intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation in response to negative and positive emotions arising from interactions with therapists.