Effekten av Life Stress Interview på känsloreglering hos individer med medicinskt oförklarade symtom: En randomiserad kontrollerad studie. ; The Effect of Life Stress Interview on Emotion Regulation in Individuals with Medically Unexplained Symptoms: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Objective. Early experience of being met negatively when expressing emotions may be a leading cause for developing difficulties with emotion regulation. Emotional suppression can be a contributing factor for the emergence of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). Patients with MUS tend to have a lack of acceptance and a negative perception towards expressing their emotions and therefore internalizing these emotions into physical symptoms. Previous research suggests that Life Stress Interview (LSI) helps participants with MUS disclose stressors, increase understanding of their emotions, and get a better understanding for linking emotions with physical symptoms. However, these studies had limitations in their methodology such as not including an active control intervention to compare LSI with and having a small sample which was improved on in this study. Furthermore, no previous study has examined the effect of LSI on emotional regulation which this study aimed to do. The measurement of emotional regulation was conducted with DERS-16. The hypothesis was that the participants who were randomized to LSI would gain a better emotion regulation than those randomized to the control intervention. Method. This study had a self-selected sampling from the general public. Participants (N = 189) were either randomized to LSI (N=93) or to the control condition which was a psychiatric assessment interview (N=96) as their first interview. The conducted LSI was a 90-minute one session intervention with the objective to help participants disclose life stressors and linking unseen needs and feelings to bodily symptoms. Participants self-reported their difficulties with emotion regulation using DERS-16 at baseline and the 6-week follow-up.Results. Analysis of covariance was conducted for the intention-to-treat (ITT) sample and the complete case (CC) sample to compare DERS-16 at baseline with the 6-week follow-up. Both analyses found a significant between-group effect. However, the post-hoc test showed a small difference in favor of ...