The Intervention Of Group Counseling For Emotion Regulation Of Abstinent Heroin Users

Drug addicts usually take drugs to deal with their negative emotions; on the other side, they often use drugs again to avoid the negative feelings that are generated due to abstinence symptoms, thus forming a vicious circle between negative emotion and drug abuse. Drug addiction can lead to abnormal changes in brain structure and function related to emotional regulation, which will harm the addict’s ability to regulate their emotions. Consequently, they cannot understand, control and regulate their negative emotions about themselves. And this is one of the important reasons of induced relapse behavior. The contemporary research on the addict’s inability to regulate emotions mainly unfold in the perspective of the regulation difficulty,abnormal reaction and expression, whereas there are few research on cognitive reappraisal of addict’s emotional regulation.Therefore, this current research based on the ability of abstinent heroin users to reappraise their cognition, compare the cognitive reappraisal ability of abstinent heroin users with that of normal subjects by using cognitive reappraisal tasks. This research also intervene the cognitive reappraisal of abstinent heroin users through the way of group counseling, aiming at help them to learn how to deal with negative emotions effectively to improve the ability to emotional regulation and thus prevent their relapse behavior.Adopting cognitive reappraisal task, experiment 1 showed that the cognitive reappraisal ability of abstinent heroin users is inferior to that of normal participants after we randomly selected 30 participants for two groups separately and compared their cognitive appraisal ability.On the basis of experiment 1, the coefficients of correlation between cognitive reappraisal ability of seventy abstinent heroin users and their levels of addiction were computed in experiment 2 by using experimental method and questionnaire method, but the analysis denoted that there was no significant correlation between them. The results also showed that the deeper the addictive degree is, the more negative feelings the addicts will experience when they viewing negative pictures.Abstinent heroin users underwent intervention about their cognitive reappraisal ability in experiment 3. The experiment group, containing fifteen participants as many as the control group, through ten times group counseling,underwent measurement of their cognitive reappraisal and other related questionnairesbefore and after ten group counseling.No obvious effect was observed in the cognitive reappraisal ability of abstinent heroin users after the intervention of group counseling.This current research found that the ability to regulate emotion of heroin addicts is flawed, but no significant correlation was denoted between addictive degree and their emotional regulation ability. Besides drug addicts’ inability to regulate their emotions cannot be improved by short-term group counseling.