Expressive Writing as an Emotion Regulation Intervention for Improving Cancer Caregiver and Patient Health

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and supported by SBE's Social Psychology program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. James Gross at Stanford University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the role of emotion regulation in caregiving for cancer patients. Caregivers play a critical role in cancer care and treatment by providing emotional, financial, and medical support on a daily basis. With the growing rise in cancer cases and movement towards cancer care in outpatient and home settings, cancer caregivers' demands only continue to increase. Substantial research suggests that the ways in which caregivers manage the demands of caregiving can profoundly impact their health and patient's health. This project seeks to improve cancer caregiver and patient health by enhancing healthier emotion regulation in caregivers. In doing so, it will use a nationally representative sample, which will increase the generalizability of its findings to a wide range of caregivers and patients. It will also use a well-established and low-cost emotion regulation intervention, Expressive Writing (EW), which will ultimately pave the way for more accessible cancer caregiver interventions.Despite the important implications of emotion regulation for the health of cancer caregivers and patients, its role in cancer caregiving remains largely unstudied. This project seeks to elucidate the role of emotion regulation in cancer caregiving and to enhance healthy emotion regulation in caregivers to improve caregiver and patient health. It will test three aims: Aim 1 will assess the association between caregiver emotion regulation and caregiver patient health; Aim 2 will assess the impact of an emotion regulation intervention (Expressive Writing; EW) on caregiver and patient health; and Aim 3 determine whether changes in caregiver emotion regulation explain EW's health impacts post-intervention, and 3 months later. These aims will be tested in a nationally representative sample of 500 male and female breast cancer caregivers and their (non-metastatic) patients from three large online panels. The methods used will include online survey measures of emotion regulation, health, and health-relevant covariates, as well as an online 2-group randomized controlled trial (EW vs. matched controlled condition). Findings will inform our understanding of (1) the potentially critical role of emotion regulation in cancer caregiving, whether EW with cancer caregivers improves the health of (2) caregivers and (3) patients, and whether (4) emotion regulation explains why EW may improve health. This research also holds broader insights for social psychology and affective science by informing our understanding of how emotion regulation operates within caregiving contexts and what the most effective ways for changing emotion regulation are.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.