Smiling is Fun, an online intervention for the prevention and treatment of emotional disorders
Abstract
Emotional disorders represent a Mental Health problem that carries a high personal and social cost. Designing tools for treatment and prevention is one of the current challenges of clinical psychology. The program Smiling is Fun is an online system designed taking in account the transdiagnostic perspective and based on the Unified Protocol of Barlow. This paper presents a description of the program and preliminary data of its effectiveness obtained in a pilot study conducted in Spain. The program is shown able to decrease depressive and anxiety symptoms, as well as to improve the positive and negative affect of the participants. This preliminary data shows the potential of this type of interventions that are being developed in many countries around Europe, in North America, and Australia. Smiling is Fun is the first program in Spanish that has efficacy data already being published. In Latin America there are very few published papers with these features, but there are already some researchers who are working in this region, therefore it is expected that developments under this line of research will grow up in the coming years.
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