Problem statement and background
Emotional exhaustion and burnout among medical professionals form a growing problem in healthcare, jeopardizing the well-being, sustainable employability and retention of healthcare providers. Thus, the quality and safety of healthcare is also compromised. The increase in emotional exhaustion and burnout extends to other sectors such as higher education, where students also face significant psychological challenges like anxiety and depression. Attention to emotion regulation – the capacity to consciously influence the emotions that one has and how those emotions are expressed (Gross, 2008) – is key to addressing these concerns and requires a comprehensive understanding of healthy emotion regulation and effective interventions (Jackson-Koku & Grime, 2019 , Martín-Brufau et al, 2020).
As part of an innovation project, we decided to develop and evaluate an emotion regulation training program to mitigate burnout and enhance well-being among medical professionals and trainees. To do this well-founded, we offer two internships each aimed at performing a systematic review: the first on existing emotion regulation training programs to identify effective components and structures, and the second on assessing the reliability, validity and any potential shortcomings of existing measurement instruments for evaluating emotion regulation. Key questions we would like to see answered include:
- What structure and elements characterize effective emotion regulation training?
- What types of instruments exist for measuring emotion regulation?
- What is known about the reliability and validity of these instruments for measuring emotion regulation?
- What is known about the effectiveness of emotion regulation training programs?
- What factors influence the effectiveness of such trainings?