Effects of a Short Emotional Management Program on Inpatients with Schizophrenia: A Pilot Study

Abstract

The prevalence of schizophrenia is gradually increasing worldwide. Many patients with schizophrenia have a diminished ability to empathize and to detect their own emotions or those of others, deteriorating their social functioning and their quality of life. Nonetheless, emotional management training may improve patients’ emotion recognition, emotional expression, and negative symptoms. Developing and applying a short but effective program that reflects the current medical environment, in which hospital stays are ever-diminishing, is warranted. This one-group, pretest–posttest, quasi-experimental pilot study aimed to examine the effects of a short emotional management program (EMP-S) on 17 patients with chronic schizophrenia. Participants were patients hospitalized in the National Center for Mental Health in Korea. After the completion of a twice-a-week, eight-session, four-week long EMP-S, participants showed improvements in emotion recognition, emotional expression, and negative symptoms. Our results suggest the applicability and potential effectiveness of the EMP-S, which takes the length of psychiatric hospital stay and the inpatient environment into consideration. To minimize any barriers to social functioning in the post-discharge lives of inpatients with chronic schizophrenia and enhance their social cognition—by improving their emotion recognition, emotional expression, and negative symptoms—we suggest the periodical administration of this EMP-S to these inpatients.

Effectiveness of Psycho-Motivational Training on Improving Social Skills and Emotional Regulation in Patients with Schizophrenia

“…This might be linked to the need of patients with schizophrenia for help to improve their social cognition skills, emotion regulation skills and contact with others in suitable ways. These results agreed with Park et al (32) who indicated that a gradual increase in their emotion recognition score represent in improved sensitivity to facial expressions, emotional attention, and emotional clarity and improved the emotion recognition skills regarding negative emotions. Similarly, Lam et al (33) revealed that better application of adaptive emotion regulation approaches may enhance the emotion regulation process in patients with schizophrenia, therefore, informing a new management direction to help patients deal with emotional experiences.…”