Symposia
Telehealth/m-Health
Javier Fernandez-Alvarez, Ph.D.
Aigle Foundation
Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anna Babl, PhD
Post-Doctoral Fellow
University of Bern
Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Cristina Botella, Ph.D.
Professor
Universitat Jaume I
Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain
Juan Martin Gomez Penedo, PhD
postdoctoral Fellow
University of Zürich
Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social interactions were restricted worldwide. In-person psychotherapy was not the exception, emerging videoconferencing psychotherapy (VCP) as an indispensable tool for many psychotherapists to continue their daily work. Despite the massive implementation of VCP and the evidence showing its efficiency to treat a vast array of psychological problems, little is known regarding how it works and for whom. From all the potential candidates that may work as mechanisms of change, emotion regulation (ER) is of particular interest for its transtheoretical and transdiagnostic nature. Thus, we conducted a study with the aim of analyzing how the longitudinal improvement of ER is associated with therapeutic benefit disaggregating the between-person (BP) and within-person (WP) effects. This entails to study how the average levels of ER in patients can be associated with clinical severity; that is, BP effects, which is the strategy that has traditionally been used the most in process and outcome research. Furthermore, to explore the variability in individual ER dynamics, it is necessary to study the effects of fluctuations in ER during psychotherapeutic approaches on the clinical severity of patients; that is, WP effects. We recruited 310 patients with depressive or anxiety symptomatology from a clinical center. Patients underwent a cognitive behavioral integrative psychotherapy. ER and symptomatology were measured with the Outcome Questionnaire 30 (OQ-30) and the State Difficulties of Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-S). We conducted two-level conditional models analyzing the effect of ER in each of the outcome variables. First, the effects of the overall level of ER over the outcome variables (between-patient). Second, the effects of fluctuations in ER over the outcome variables (within- patient). The model showed significant between-patient effects on symptomatology of ER, γ01 = 1.06, SE = 0.05, t(207) = 22.46, p < .001. Furthermore, this model presented significant within-patient effect on the OQ score of ER, γ10 = 0.70, SE = 0.04, t(97) =18.39, p < .001. This study represents an initial longitudinal exploration of ER as a mechanism of change in a naturalistic setting that implements VCP. In light of the results, it is possible to ascertain that ER precedes symptomatologic change at the individual level (WP effects), even when adjusting for the effect of stable patients’ characteristics (BP effects). Implications for further research and clinical practice will be discussed.