The Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Courses in Improving the Emergency Medicine Residents and Interns' Ability to Regulate their Emotions in Threatening or Stressful Events

Background: Given that the duties of an emergency medicine (EM) specialist are much more complicated than the other health care professionals, inexperience, weakness or inability to make appropriate decisions, and lack of control over their emotions and stress can lead to medical errors. This study aimed at determining the effect of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) of emotion regulation on the EM assistants' and interns' level of satisfaction and cognitive control of anger and stress.

Materials and methods: In this study, 25 EM residents and interns were trained in the virtual CBT course while 19 ones were not given any training in the control group and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) were filled before and after the training intervention.

Results: After the training intervention, the dimensions of catastrophizing and other blame in the experimental group with the means of 3.84 ± 1.40 and 3.16 ± 0.94 respectively were significantly lower than these dimensions in the control group with the means of 5.68 ± 1.76 and 4.73 ± 1.15, respectively (P value < 0.05). Moreover, the refocus on planning in the experimental group with the means of 8.40 ± 1.53 was significantly higher than in the control group with the means of 7.00 ± 2.05 (P value < 0.05).

Conclusion: CBT method used in this study may be effective in controlling the emotions of EM interns and residents. CBT may help them to regulate anger and stress and have the ability to control their emotions during or after the experience of threatening or stressful events.