Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Nov 10, 2020
Date Accepted: May 25, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 12, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An ecological momentary compassion-focused intervention for enhancing resilience in help-seeking youth: a pilot study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Digital interventions offer new avenues for low-threshold prevention and treatment in youth. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) represent a powerful approach that allows for adaptive, real-time, and real-real world delivery of intervention components in daily life. Compassion-focused interventions may be particularly amenable to translation into an EMI to strengthen emotional resilience and modifying putative risk mechanisms in daily lives of young help-seeking individuals.
Objective:
We aimed to investigate initial therapeutic effects, feasibility, and safety of a novel, accessible, transdiagnostic, ecological momentary, compassion-focused intervention for improving emotional resilience to stress (‘EMIcompass’) in an uncontrolled pilot study including help-seeking youth with psychotic, depressive, and/or anxiety symptoms. The EMIcompass intervention consisted of three sessions with a trained psychologist and a 3-week EMI administered through a mobile health app.
Methods:
In an uncontrolled pilot study including help-seeking youth with psychotic, depressive, and/or anxiety symptoms. The EMIcompass intervention consisted of three sessions with a trained psychologist and a 3-week EMI administered through a mobile health app.
Results:
In total, ten individuals (Mage=20.3 years) were included in the study. Reduced stress sensitivity, momentary negative affect, and psychotic experiences as well as increased positive affect were found at post-intervention and 4-week follow-up. Further, reductions in psychotic, anxiety, and depressive symptoms of medium to large effect size were found (r=0.30-0.65). Most participants were satisfied (80%) and reported low burden of app usage. No adverse events were observed.
Conclusions:
Our findings provide initial evidence on beneficial effects, feasibility, and safety of the EMIcompass intervention in help-seeking youth. An exploratory randomised controlled trial is warranted to establish feasibility and preliminary evidence of efficacy.
Citation
