On what do therapists agree? Assessing therapist evaluations of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness.

Abstract

To develop more unified, process-based, and disseminable psychotherapy treatments, it is important to determine whether there is consensus among therapists regarding intervention strategies. 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. Therapists (n=582) read eleven vignettes describing stressful scenarios and rated the effectiveness of ten emotion regulation strategies in each scenario. 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. 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. 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.