Aim of the study:
Difficulties with emotion regulation can be found in most mental disorders. However, we know little about the changes in negative and positive emotions during the treatment process. The presented longitudinal study, therefore focuses such changes and investigates acceptance and suppression, separately for negative and positive emotions during the treatment process. The goals were to investigate if there is a measurable change of acceptance and suppression of negative and positive emotions during the course of treatment of depressive patients and to investigate how the results of such patients at the end of their treatment compare to those of healthy controls.

Subject or material and methods:
Subjects were 40 depressive patients and 29 healthy controls. The Beck-Depression-Inventory and the State-Trait-Anxiety Inventory were used to assess the level of symptoms. The Emotion Acceptance Questionnaire - to assess acceptance and suppression of negative and positive emotions - was used twice: once at the beginning and once at the end of the inpatients’ treatment.

Results:
Depressive patients reported reduced acceptance of positive and negative emotions compared to controls, but they additionally suppressed emotions more intensively. Suppression of negative and positive emotions throughout the study was related to the level of depression and anxiety symptoms.

Discussion:
The analysis showed a significant improvement of emotion regulation strategies, towards the end of treatment. However, patients did not reach the same level of capabilities as healthy controls.

Conclusions:
For future research, we suggest to extend the study by observing the specifics of emotion regulation changes over a longer period of time.