Main description:

Emotion Regulation is currently one of the most popular topics in clinical psychology. Numerous studies demonstrate that deficits in emotion regulation skills are likely to help maintain various forms of psychological disorders. Thus, enhancing emotion regulation has become a major target in psychotherapeutic treatments. For this purpose, a number of therapeutic strategies have been developed and shown to be effective. However, for practitioners it is often difficult to decide which of these strategies they should use or how they can effectively combine empirically-validated strategies. Thus, the authors developed the Affect Regulation Training as a transdiagnostic intervention which systematically integrates strategies from cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, emotion-focused therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy. The effectiveness of ART has been demonstrated in several high-quality studies.

Contents:

Emotion Regulation and Mental Health.- ART Development Model of Emotion Regulation Deficits.- Use of affect regulation training as a psychological intervention.- Guidelines for effective delivery of affect regulation training.- Training format and logistics.- ART module one- introduction and psychoeducation.- ART module two- muscle and breathing relaxation.- Module three- psychoeducation part II (The importance of regular practice).- Module four - nonjudgemental awareness.- Module five- acceptance and tolerance.- Module six- compassionate self-support.- Module seven- analyzing emotions.- Module eight- modifying emotions.- Module nine- Additional practice using ART skill #6 (Analyzing Emotions) & ART Skill #7 (modifying emotions) with common challenging emotions.- Program evaluation, efficacy findings, and future opportunities.- closing words.