Novel emotion regulation intervention may improve veterans’ distress resilience
A novel intervention designed to strengthen resilience against emotional distress among military veterans was linked to positive outcomes, according to study results published in Frontiers in Psychology.
“Among the most important personal attributes associated with resilience are the ability to self-regulate emotional responses and adaptively engage cognitive/executive control,” Sanda Dolcos, PhD, of the department of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues wrote. “Here, we provide proof-of-concept-evidence regarding the effectiveness of a novel training alternative that captures the complexity of [emotion regulation] in everyday life. Our training program is grounded in the emotion regulation choice framework and is based on a multidimensional approach involving behavioral, personality, clinical and brain imaging assessments.”
Although current evidence underscores the importance of emotion regulation in psychological wellbeing, the researchers noted that the translation of emotion regulation’s beneficial effects from the laboratory to the real world is scarce. In the current pilot intervention, Dolcos and colleagues analyzed data of military veterans who were trained over 5 to 8 weeks in applying two effective emotion regulation strategies, Focused Attention and Cognitive Reappraisal, to scenarios that presented emotional conflicts and that were constructed with both external and internal cues. Before and after training, the researchers collected data via neuropsychological, personality and clinical assessments, as well as resting-state functional MRI data from a subsample of participants.
Results after training showed improvements in executive function and psychological wellbeing, which were apparent in increased working memory, post-traumatic growth and general self-efficacy. The researchers observed via brain imaging results diminished bottom-up influences from emotional and perceptual brain regions, as well as evidence of normalized functional connectivity in the large-scale functional networks following training, with the latter demonstrated in increased connectivity among cognitive and emotion control regions and across regions of self-referential and control networks.
“Our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that resilience and well-being can be learned through [emotion regulation] training, and that training-related improvements manifested in both behavioral change and neuroplasticity can translate into real-life benefits,” Dolcos and colleagues wrote.