Effect of Psychosocial Interventions on Children and Youth Emotion Regulation: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

To investigate the effect of psychosocial interventions on emotion regulation outcomes in children and youth (0–23 years). We conducted a meta-analysis using a three-level modeling approach extracting multiple effect-sizes from experimental and quasi-experimental studies. We included 40 interventions from 35 publications involving 3,891 participants and extracted 258 posttreatment effect sizes. Analyses were performed to assess intervention effects on emotion regulation, moderating effects of inclusion of acceptance focus and other potential moderators. Additionally, we examined intervention effects on mental health outcomes. Interventions showed a significant small-to-medium effect on emotion regulation (d = 0.37, 95% CI [0.22, 0.51], p