Abstract
University students have high levels of anxiety and depression, which have only increased since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Common therapies for depression and anxiety, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), have shown efficacy with brief, online delivered interventions. Cognitive restructuring (a cognitive technique utilized in CBT) and cognitive defusion (a cognitive technique derived from ACT) show results in decreasing anxiety and depression when being tested alone. This randomized, controlled pilot study attempts to compare three conditions in a college sample: a cognitive restructuring brief intervention, a cognitive defusion brief intervention, and a control condition to evaluate group differences across time. Participants were randomized into two brief journaling conditions, which were instructed to practice either cognitive defusion or cognitive restructuring once a day for 14 days, and one control condition. Unfortunately, a high dropout rate led to difficulties identifying differences between the conditions over time. Further, the control condition was noticeably different than the two control conditions on several key baseline characteristics, rendering all comparisons suspect. Future work should serve to further explore the processes of cognitive defusion and cognitive restructuring found in ACT and CBT.