The work of Houck et al. provides an important contribution in understanding strategies to reduce sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV in adolescents by utilizing emotional regulation skills.
By helping young people understand their emotions and how that relates to behavior in the context of a sexual encounter, the after school intervention program helped teens regulate positive and negative emotions. Specifically, it utilized three strategies: get out, let it out, and think it out. Games and role playing gave teens a chance to practice these strategies in scenarios of varying risk.
Teenagers who underwent emotional regulation training, rather than simply being taught about adolescent health topics, fared much better in reducing the transition to vaginal sex over a 30-month period.
Carol Ford, MD, and her colleague James Jaccard, PhD, pointed out the superiority of the emotional training, compared with just sexual health information.
“Together, these findings reveal the importance of gearing more attention toward emotions and the regulation of emotions when developing interventions aimed at influencing adolescent sexual behavior,” they wrote. “Behavioral decision theory implicates the role of adolescent cognitions about engaging in sex, norms and peer pressure, and adolescent image prototypes surrounding sex.”
More broadly, Dr. Ford and Dr. Jaccard, believe that this research is the beginning to designing better interventions.
“As we come to understand the types of cognitions and emotions that dominate working memory in high-risk sexual situations, we can effectively design interventions that help shape cognitive and affective appraisals and how youth process those appraisals when making choices.”
Carol Ford, MD, is the chief of the Craig-Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; she holds the Orton P. Jackson Endowed Chair in Adolescent Medicine. James Jaccard, PhD, is a professor of social work at New York University Silver School of Social Work. This is a summary of their commentary that accompanied the article by Houck et al. (Pediatrics. 2018 May 10. doi: 10.1542/peds.2017-4143). They had no financial disclosures, and there was no external funding.
