The Role of Emotion Regulation in the Treatment of Child Anxiety ...

290 Clin Child Fam Psychol Rev (2007) 10:275–293
child could practice diverting her attention away from her
physiological arousal through a biofeedback system during
a regular exposure session. A child could even play a
computer game aimed at training attention toward positive
information for 10 min at the end of each session. Similarly,
the therapist could work with parents separately on
the aforementioned parenting skills and children could
practice sending, experiencing, and receiving affective
messages in group therapy with other anxious children.
Before these strategies are implemented in a clinical setting
or in private practice, their efficacy needs to be examined
in controlled clinical treatment trials and change in emotion
regulation needs to be directly measured to determine
if such processes truly mediate change. The pilot study on
Emotion Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Suveg
et al. 2006) suggests that incorporating more emotion
regulation skills into therapy is promising, although this
program still needs to be compared with traditional CBT to
examine whether treatment gains are above and beyond
usual outcomes.
It is expected that inclusion of specific emotion regulation
components will soon become reality in treatment of child
anxiety, as is already happening in the area of adult psychopathology
(e.g., Clyne and Blampied 2004; Mennin
2004). This overview of emotion regulation difficulties and
strategies to modify them hopefully will serve as a catalyst
for designing treatments for children that address more
explicitly the emotion regulation component of psychopathology,
as well as the cognitive and behavioral components.
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