Emotion regulation plays an important role in the development and treatment of depression. The present study investigated whether the emotion regulation strategies, expressive suppression (ES) and cognitive reappraisal (CR) change in the course of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) of depressive inpatients. Furthermore, it also examined whether changes in CR and ES correlated with positive treatment outcomes.
Forty-four inpatients from a psychotherapeutic hospital who suffered from a depressive disorder (mean age =36.4 years, standard deviation =13.4 years; 63.6% female) filled in the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the Beck Depression Inventory at admission and discharge. To detect changes in emotion regulation, and depression across treatment, data were analyzed using multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) for repeated measures, effect sizes, and Spearman correlations. A P-value of ≤0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Depression severity ( F[1]=10.42, P=0.003; η 2 =0.22) and CR ( F[1]=4.71, P=0.04; η 2 =0.11) changed significantly across CBT treatment. ES remained virtually stable. Post-treatment scores of CR were also positively correlated with reduction in depressive symptoms across treatment ( ρ=0.30, P=0.05).