A six-week group program of emotion focused family therapy for parents of children with mental health challenges: protocol for a randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with mental health difficulties are at increased risk of many adverse psychological, academic, and social outcomes. Emotion regulation is a key transdiagnostic factor in the development and maintenance of mental health challenges. Parents and the family system (e.g., parental functioning, parenting, parent-child relationship) play a central role in children's development of emotion regulation and, in turn, their mental health. Therefore, continued efforts are needed to understand the effectiveness of emotion-focused treatments for child mental health difficulties, particularly those that include a family-based approach. Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is an intervention for parents of children with mental health difficulties that teaches parents advanced skills to support their child's emotional development, potentially leading to improvements in the psychological functioning of the affected child as well as the family. Despite this, EFFT's efficacy has yet to be tested empirically via a randomized controlled trial. METHODS: A six-week group modality of EFFT was developed based on the standard manualized version of a two-day group modality of EFFT. Efficacy of the six-week group modality of EFFT will be tested in a randomized controlled trial among parents of children aged 7 to 15 with anxiety, depression, or behavioral challenges. Parents will be randomized to the intervention condition or waitlist control condition. Online questionnaires and in-lab assessments will be conducted at pre-treatment, post-treatment, 4-month follow-up and 1-year follow-up. Intervention effects on primary (parent psychological symptoms, child psychological symptoms, parent emotion regulation, child emotion regulation, parent-child co-regulation) and secondary (parental emotion socialization, parent emotion blocks, parental self-efficacy, perceived parental stress, treatment satisfaction, treatment fidelity) outcomes will be analyzed by linear mixed models. DISCUSSION: The study protocol describes the randomized controlled trial of EFFT, a parent group intervention for parents of children with anxiety, depression, and behavioral challenges. Findings contribute to the understanding of the efficacy of EFFT as a time-limited, transdiagnostic intervention for the treatment of child mental health challenges with potential positive impacts on parent and family functioning. TRIAL REGISTRATION [2A]: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT05603000. Prospectively registered October 13, 2022. PROTOCOL VERSION [3]: Version 1.1 November 2023.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.078 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".