Savouring as an Intervention to Decrease Negative Affect in Anxious Mothers of Children with Autism and Neurotypical Children

Abstract

Savouring is an emotion regulation strategy and intervention that focuses on the process of attending, intensifying and prolonging positive experiences and positive affect associated with these memories. Personal savouring involves a reflection on positive memories that are specific to the individual and do not involve others. In contrast, relational savouring entails reflecting on instances when people were responsive to the needs of their significant others. Such interventions hold potential benefits in enhancing positive affect (PA) and reducing negative affect (NA) for both parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and parents of neurotypical children. Adults with greater symptoms of generalised anxiety have been found to have less PA and more NA. However, no study has investigated the effects of a mother’s anxiety symptoms on the efficacy of savouring in enhancing PA and reducing NA. Thus, this paper combined personal and relational savouring to investigate whether savouring may enhance PA and reduce NA of a pooled sample of mothers of neurotypical children and mothers of children with ASD. 52 mothers of neurotypical children and 26 mothers of children with ASD aged 3–7 years old were given a series of questionnaires and randomly assigned to either relational savouring or personal savouring conditions. In relational savouring, mothers were asked to reflect upon a shared positive experience with their child while in the personal savouring condition, a personal positive experience was recalled. Across mothers of children with ASD and neurotypical children, findings suggest that savouring leads to a decrease in NA (p < 0.01) but not increases in PA. Similarly, mothers with higher levels of anxiety experience a greater decrease in NA (p < 0.001) compared to mothers with lower levels of anxiety post-savouring. This study proposes that a brief savouring intervention may be effective among mothers of preschoolers. As lower levels of negative affect is linked to healthier psychological well-being, mothers might be able to engage in more effective and warm parenting after savouring exercises, which would cultivate positive mother-child relationships that benefit their children in the long-term.

Relational savoring intervention: Positive impacts for mothers and evidence of cultural compatibility for Latinas.

“…One of the most significant strengths is our use of a robust control condition, PS, which is itself an intervention. That is, PS positively impacted well-being in several investigations with parents of young children (e.g., Burkhart et al, 2015; Pereira et al, 2021). An additional strength of the current study is the inclusion of an ethnically diverse sample of mothers, which enhances the generalizability of some of our findings to a broader population.…”

Current Progress and Future Directions for Theory and Research on Savoring

“…Illustrating the many ways savoring has been applied, positive psychologists have developed an impressive array of cognitive-behavioral techniques for teaching clients how to savor as a way of reducing emotional deficits associated with depression ( McMakin et al, 2011 ), hopelessness ( Chen and Zhou, 2017 ), anxiety ( Pereira et al, 2021 ), schizophrenia ( Meyer et al, 2012 ), and anhedonia ( Strauss, 2013 ). Researchers have also used savoring exercises to strengthen depressed people’s help-seeking intentions ( Straszewski and Siegel, 2018 ), as well as to increase optimism ( Biskas et al, 2018 ), happiness ( Salces-Cubero et al, 2019 ), and life satisfaction ( Smith and Bryant, 2019 ) among non-depressed individuals.…”

A relational savoring intervention predicts higher levels of adherence to COVID-19 health recommendations.

“…In future testing, it might be wise to examine the effects of RS without mindfulness preparation as compared to RS with mindfulness preparation to determine whether mindfulness increases one’s ability to engage in RS. Finally, personal savoring is an active control condition that also has positive impacts on key outcomes of interest, such as emotion (Borelli et al, 2022; Burkhart et al, 2015; Pereira et al, 2021). This means that in the present study, there was no true no-treatment control condition.…”