The Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) Program Versus the Unified Protocol (UP)
University of Pittsburgh
Summary
Too few clinicians are able and willing to help autistic patients. A recent review identified challenges to mental health service delivery in autism, including a lack of interventions designed for community implementation and limited workforce capacity. It has been argued that improving impairment in emotion regulation has the potential to improve a range of mental health difficulties in autistic people. In this clinical trial, the investigators are comparing two evidence-based interventions for emotion regulation, to determine if one created specifically for autistic people is clinically superior. The interventions will be implemented in the community, through partnering agencies.
Description
This study will compare the effectiveness of two transdiagnostic interventions for autistic adolescents and young adults - an intervention in widespread use among non-autistic populations (The Unified Protocol; UP) versus an autism-specific intervention (The Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement Program; EASE). The UP and EASE are ideal comparators because they are structurally equivalent and transdiagnostic - both shown to improve mental health outcomes that stakeholders identify as important, such as depression, irritability, and anxiety. The investigators will partner with 12 different c…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 10–30 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: * professional diagnosis of ASD * a score in the clinical range on the EDI-Reactivity or EDI-Dysphoria scale based on caregiver report or self-report * The study is open to people with a range of communication abilities. Participants must be able to consent to the study themselves and answer questions about themselves. * Participants need to have a support person that could answer questions about them too. This could be a parent, caregiver, family member, partner or friend. Independent adults can opt out of this portion. * Participants must live in Alabama or Pennsylvania.…
Interventions
- BehavioralThe Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement Program
EASE is a cutting-edge program created by researchers at the University of Alabama and the University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with autistic individuals, caregivers of autistic youth, and therapists. The overarching goal of the program is to support autistic clients who want to work on emotion regulation. EASE is unique because it targets emotional distress in autistic youth and adults, instead of targeting the core symptoms of autism (i.e., it is not a social skills intervention). The program is a 16-session, mindfulness-based intervention. Each session is 1:1 for 45 minutes to one hour. While the program is designed for individual intervention, caregivers are also invited to play an active role on the care team.
- BehavioralThe Unified Protocol
UP is a thoroughly-studied, manualized intervention created by researchers at the University of Miami in conjunction with researchers at Boston University. The program was designed to be customizable to meet the needs of people with a variety of diagnoses, allowing more individuals to access emotion regulation resources. The protocol also has different modules to accommodate different developmental levels (UP-Children, UP-Adolescent, UP-Adult). The overall goal of UP is to help clients identify emotions and build new strategies to cope with stressful life situations and distressing emotions. The protocol is flexible, with each session is about 45 to 60 minutes and the number of sessions varying between 12 - 21 sessions. For the current study, the treatment will take place over 16 sessions. The intervention is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) based but also includes hints of mindfulness-based intervention strategies.
Locations (2)
- University of AlabamaTuscaloosa, Alabama
- University of PittsburghPittsburgh, Pennsylvania