Expressed Emotion Towards Individuals with Mental and Physical Health Conditions: A Structured Literature Review

Abstract

Expressed Emotion (EE) is a well-validated measure of the family environment of individuals with mental and physical conditions that examines relatives’ critical, hostile and emotionally overinvolved attitudes towards a family member with a condition. This review focuses on studies of EE on containing data of the impact of Expressed Emotion on the course of chronic illnesses and clinical outcomes in mental and physical health conditions. The structural literature review is based on the search of articles in peer-reviewed journals from 1991 to November, 2018 in the databases Psyc-Info and PubMed. Taken together, these results suggest that there is an association between EE towards patients with both physical and mental conditions and  a poor clinical and personal recovery. Interestingly, the lower levels of EE towards individuals with a condition were observed  in partners comparatively with parents, adult children and relatives. However, the results have been obtained only from two populations with dementia and Type I diabetes and have been considered as important issue for future research.  

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