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A brief, emotion-coaching intervention for caregivers of pediatric eating disorder patients: feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impacts on emotion regulation
Dissertation

A brief, emotion-coaching intervention for caregivers of pediatric eating disorder patients: feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impacts on emotion regulation

Claire M. Trainor
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
Jun 2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00010497
pdf
Trainor_Claire_20252.53 MB
PDF Embargoed Access, Embargo ends: 31 Aug 2026

Abstract

Eating disorders--Psychological aspects Emotion regulation Family functioning Child Psychiatry
Pediatric eating disorders (EDs) are serious psychiatric illnesses with often low remission rates following gold-standard, evidence-based interventions. Extant research highlights both emotion regulation (ER) and family factors as contributing factors to low remission rates. Caregivers play a critical role in helping adolescents to develop adaptive ER skills by modeling healthy strategies and appropriately responding to their child's emotions. As such, an intervention targeting parent emotional responding, by (1) identifying and remedying maladaptive ER strategies within the caregiver and (2) teaching caregivers skills to appropriately attune and respond to their child's emotions, may improve treatment outcomes. Accordingly, this mixed-methods study enrolled parents of children and adolescents (N = 9) who were in ED treatment to test the feasibility and acceptability of a four-session adjunctive emotion coaching. It assessed preliminary associations with changes in parent ER, coping with children's negative emotions, and adolescent ER, as well as adolescent ED symptoms. The intervention was overall feasible and acceptable to participants, indicated by overall acceptability ratings of 4.7/5 and positive qualitative feedback. Retention was high in the study. Effect sizes, as measured by Cohen's d, highlighted large, positive effects on parental global emotion regulation (d = .81), as well as parental ability to engage in goal directed behavior (d = .99) and regulate impulsivity (d = .99). There was a large, positive effect on parental emotion focused response to children's negative affect (d = -.81). Parents also reported greater adolescent awareness of emotion, with a medium effect size (d = .72). ED pathology improved significantly, though this is likely attributable to involvement in other treatment. Given high retention, acceptability ratings, and improvements in dyadic family processes likely to improve treatment outcomes, this intervention warrants future testing as an adjunct to other treatments for adolescent EDs.

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