4 - (SYM 12) Changes in Savoring and Emotion Suppression Following Treatment with the Internet-based Unified Protocol

Savoring, “the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life,” (Bryant & Veroff, 2007, p.xi) is an adaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategy that amplifies the impact of positive emotions (Quoidbach et al., 2010). Increased savoring is associated with higher positive affect (PA; Jose et al., 2010), while deficits are associated with anxiety (Eisner et al., 2009). In contrast, the ER strategy of emotion suppression (ES), the dampening of outward displays of emotion (Gross, 2003), is associated with greater anxiety and depression (Aldoa et al., 2010), higher negative affect, and lower positive affect (Brockman et al., 2017). Given these relationships, the present study examined whether participants who completed the iUP+, which incorporates a focus on savoring, evidenced greater increases in this construct, and greater decreases in ES, than those in the iUP condition. To explore the implications of such changes, we then examined whether changes in savoring predicted changes in ES, anxiety, and depression across groups. 

Participants (n= 44) completed the Savoring Beliefs Inventory (SBI; Bryant, 2003), the ES subscale of the Emotion Response Questionnaire (Gross, 2003), and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-Short Form (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) before and after treatment. ES and SBI scores were moderately correlated at baseline (r (78) = -.30, p =.01) and post-treatment (r(42) = -.398, p </span>= .01). Mixed ANOVAs showed significant effects of time on both ES (F(1, 42) = 5.44, p = .03) and SBI scores (F(1,44) = 5.95, p = 0.02), but no significant effect of treatment condition for either outcome, suggesting that both the iUP and iUP+ led to comparable changes in this construct. Change scores were calculated for the total sample for both ES (M = -2.09, SD = 4.3) and the SBI (M = 8.93, SD = 18.93). Regressions found that change in savoring during treatment accounted for 14.5% of the variance in change in ES score (R2 =.145, F(1, 42) = 7.11, p = .01), and 8.6% of the change in anxiety scores (R2 =.086, F(1, 42) = 3.96, p = .05), but did not predict change in depression symptoms (R2 =.050, F(1, 42) = 2.19, p = .15). 

These preliminary results suggest that savoring may constitute a worthwhile treatment target, as changes in this construct predict changes in a key maladaptive emotion regulation strategy, as well as symptoms of anxiety. Analyses will be updated to include the full sample (N=120) upon study completion, and we will discuss the implications of these findings for treatment approaches that target positive affect and related constructs.