A Randomized Controlled Trial of Emotion Regulation Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder with and Without Co-occurring Depression

Objective: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depression (MDD), especially when they co-occur, are associated with suboptimal treatment response. One common feature of these disorders is negative self-referential processing (NSRP; i.e., worry, rumination), which worsens treatment outcome. Emotion Regulation Therapy (ERT) integrates principles from affect science with traditional and contemporary cognitive-behavioral treatments to identify and modify the functional nature of NSRP by targeting motivational and regulatory mechanisms, as well as behavioral consequences.

Method: Building on encouraging open trial findings, 53 patients with a primary diagnosis of GAD (43% with comorbid MDD) were randomly assigned to immediate treatment with ERT (n = 28) or a modified attention control condition (MAC, n = 25).

Results: ERT patients, as compared with MAC patients, evidenced statistically and clinically meaningful improvement on clinical indicators of GAD and MDD, worry, rumination, comorbid disorder severity, functional impairment, quality of life, as well as hypothesized mechanisms reflecting mindful attentional, metacognitive, and overall emotion regulation, which all demonstrated mediation of primary outcomes. This superiority of ERT exceeded medium effect sizes with most outcomes surpassing conventions for a large effect. Treatment effects were maintained for nine months following the end of acute treatment. Overall, ERT resulted in high rates of high endstate functioning for both GAD and MDD that were maintained into the follow-up period.

Conclusions: Findings provide encouraging support for the efficacy and hypothesized mechanisms underlying ERT and point to fruitful directions for improving our understanding and treatment of complex clinical conditions such as GAD with co-occurring MDD. (PsycINFO Database Record