Emotion Regulation Across Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

The ability to regulate emotions effectively has been associated with resilience to psychopathology. Emotion regulation difficulties have been proposed as a component of clinical disorders and are a primary target of a form of psychotherapy known as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). It has also been used to describe characteristics of various psychiatric disorders and is considered to be a transdiagnostic process. Poor emotion regulation has been associated with specific psychiatric disorders, however, to date, no study has attempted to estimate the magnitude of the difference in emotion regulation capacity between individuals with different psychiatric disorders and healthy controls by reviewing the existing literature. We aim to accomplish this by conducting a systematic review using PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, and MEDLINE. In this review, we are examining cross-sectional studies that compare a diagnosed psychiatric group to a healthy control group using validated and commonly used self-report emotion regulation (ER) measures (ex. DERS, ERQ, ERSQ, CERQ). The primary measure used for the meta-analysis will be the mean difference in total ER scores as well as the standardized mean difference to estimate the effect size (Hedge’s g) for total scores.