Cognitive reappraisal and self-compassion as emotion regulation strategies for parents during COVID-19: An online randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Objective Parenting during pandemic restrictions places extreme demands on everyday family life, leading to increased stress levels for parents and distressed parent-child interactions. This RCT aimed to investigate whether cognitive reappraisal and self-compassion are helpful emotion regulation (ER) strategies to reduce individual and parental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method An online intervention for parents was developed focusing on the application of ER strategies to pandemic requirements of families. A sample of 265 parents were randomly assigned to either cognitive reappraisal (CR; n = 88), self-compassion (SC; n = 90) or wait-list control (WLC; n = 87) group. Interventions included two video sessions (day 1 and day 3) and three email reminders to transfer the application of ER strategies to daily family life (days 2, 4, 5). Parents' perceived individual stress and parental stress were assessed at baseline (T0), at T1 prior to the booster session on day 3, and at T2 (7 days after baseline). Results Significant decreases from T0 to T2 emerged for both primary stress outcomes in both intervention groups. Individual stress significantly decreased in CR compared to WLC at T2, but not compared to SC. No time × group interactions for parental stress were found. However, mediation analyses suggested that parental stress was indirectly decreased via reductions in individual stress for CR compared to WLC at both time points. Conclusions COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic to affect family life. Cognitive reappraisal as a brief online intervention can ease acute stress and strengthen the mental health of parents in acute crises.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on Families’ Mental Health: The Role Played by Parenting Stress, Parents’ Past Trauma, and Resilience

“…Specifically, our results add new evidence on the importance of interventions focused on parenting support to reduce the long-term effect of the COVID-19 crisis on families and the transmission of intergenerational trauma. In fact, given that parental stress emerged as a crucial negative sequela of the pandemic for both parents and children, family-based intervention aimed at promoting parents’ intra- and inter-personal resources are called for [ 50 , 80 , 81 ]. To this end, before the COVID-19 pandemic, family-based preventive and intervention programs provided by telehealth services have shown their effectiveness in promoting positive parenting behaviors and supporting parents’ and children’s psychological well-being [ 82 , 83 ].…”

Flexible emotion regulatory selection when coping with COVID-19-related threats during quarantine

“…Specifically, an important longitudinal study that measured the role of self-reported frequency and success of a single reappraisal regulatory strategy on subsequent COVID-19 related fear and health behaviors, could not measure the selection between different strategies 17 . Similarly, several recent intervention studies that taught individuals to employ a single regulatory strategy (cognitive reappraisal 18 – 20 , or self-compassion 20 ) also did not examine regulatory selection between strategies.…”

Efetividade da Terapia Cognitivo-Comportamental on-line no cenário de pandemia da COVID-19: Uma revisão sistemática

“…Only one of them was conducted in 2020 (Wahlund et al, 2020). Three of them were conducted in Middle Eastern countries (Al-Alawi et al, 2021;Shapira et al, 2021;Shaygan et al, 2021), three on the European continent (Perri et al, 2021;Preuss et al, 2021;Wahlund et al, 2020) and one in Asia (Liu et al, 2021).…”

“…It was also possible to verify significant results in the measurements of secondary outcomes, comparing the intervention group and the control one, regarding the pre-and post--intervention moments. Improvements were seen in insomnia, mood, daily functioning, uncertainty intolerance (Wahlund et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021); perceived stress (Shaygan et al, 2021); and negative affective symptoms (Preuss et al, 2021).…”

“…As recommended by the Cochrane Collaboration, the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool was used, which classifies the risk of bias as high, low, or unclear. Of the seven studies included (Table 2), four of them presented low risk (Wahlund et al, 2020;Preuss et al, 2021;Shaygan et al, 2021;Al-Alawi et al, 2021), and the other three, high risk (Perri et al, 2021;Liu et al, 2021;Shapira et al, 2021).…”