Emotion Detectives In-Out: Feasibility and Efficacy of a Blended Version of the Unified Protocol for Children

Childhood emotional disorders, particularly anxiety disorders, are an important public health concern due to their high and increasing prevalence, impact on children's functioning in multiple domains (e.g., family, academic, social), and long-term consequences. However, there is a significant gap between their needs and access to mental healthcare, with most children lacking access to evidence-based treatments (EBT). Several factors can contribute to a lack of adequate mental health care for children, including an insufficient number of trained clinicians, the difficulty of effectively disseminating the multitude of disorder-specific EBTs for emotional disorders to clinicians, and other barriers to face-to-face treatment. An Internet-based intervention can be an effective solution to overcome these difficulties. This project aims to develop and test the efficacy of a blended intervention of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children (UP-C). The UP-C is a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) that takes a transdiagnostic approach to treating multiple emotional disorders simultaneously by addressing shared mechanisms underlying these disorders and employing a common set of EBT strategies (e.g., exposure, mindfulness). It is a child-friendly extension of the adult UP that delivers the UP core components in an interactive and child-friendly group format with extensive parent involvement. It has 15 weekly sessions for children and 15 weekly sessions for parents with an approximate duration of 90 minutes each. With a blended approach the researchers aim to improve the delivery of UP-C, by retaining the benefits of face-to-face and online therapy, while mitigating their limitations. This new version is expected to reduce costs of the therapy for families and institutions while also increasing compliance, motivation, uptake of treatment principles, and facilitating generalization of the application of core treatment components. The blended version of the UP-C, named "Emotion Detectives In-Out" consists of 15 weekly sessions with the children (9 face-to-face group sessions, 4 online self-guided sessions and 2 videoconference sessions). The groups will consist of about 5 to 7 children. Face-to-face sessions have an expected duration of 90 minutes and will be implemented by clinical psychologists with specific training in the program. The online sessions were developed by the research team and are completely self-guided. These sessions last approximately 45 minutes. Parents will be asked to participate in 2 face-to-face sessions, 4 videoconference sessions and 10 self-guided online sessions.