Objective
To develop more unified, process‐based, and disseminable psychotherapy treatments, it is important to determine whether there is consensus among therapists regarding intervention strategies.
Design
Because emotion regulation is a cornerstone of modern treatments and a thriving area of clinical research, we assessed therapists’ ratings of the effectiveness of commonly studied emotion regulation strategies.
Methods
Therapists (n = 582) read eleven vignettes describing stressful scenarios and rated the effectiveness of ten emotion regulation strategies in each scenario.
Results
Across therapists, we found general consensus regarding the most (i.e., problem‐solving) and least (i.e., concealing emotions) effective strategies. Cognitive/behavioural/third‐wave therapists rated acceptance and distraction as more effective, and emotional expression and gathering information as less effective, than other therapists, Fs> 4.20, ps < .05, whereas hours of clinical experience were generally unrelated to strategy effectiveness ratings.
Conclusions
We discuss what these points of agreement and relative disagreement among therapists reveal about a more unified, process‐based treatment approach and how these results can guide emotion regulation research.
Practitioner points
There is general consensus among practising therapists that problem‐solving is the most effective emotion regulation strategy and expressive suppression is the least effective.
However, CBT‐oriented therapists rated acceptance and distraction as more effective than non‐CBT‐oriented therapists.
Non‐CBT‐oriented therapists rated emotional expression and gathering information as more effective than CBT‐oriented therapists.
Years of experience were unrelated to ratings of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness.