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21 Emotion Regulation Worksheets & Strategies
21 Emotion Regulation Worksheets & Strategies
The skills that allow you to manage and direct your emotions
are called emotion regulation skills (see self-regulation), and
it doesn’t take a pilgrimage to a holy site or thousands of
dollars to learn these secrets to feeling better.
This article will see you learn about emotion regulation and help you develop and improve the skills
necessary for staying balanced and emotionally stable.
Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for
free. These science-based exercises will not only enhance your ability to understand and regulate your
emotions but will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students or
employees.
A Take-Home Message
References
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1. Interpersonal effectiveness;
2. Distress tolerance/reality acceptance skills;
3. Emotion regulation;
4. Mindfulness skills.
The emotion regulation portion focuses on skills that benefit everyone who has emotions (i.e., every
human!), but they are most beneficial for those struggling with mood or personality disorders, especially
those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
In this module, clients learn how to understand and accept their emotions, reduce their emotional
vulnerability and volatility, and decrease their emotional suffering (Bray, 2013).
One of the most important aspects of treatment is recognizing that negative or painful emotions are not
inherently bad. Clients are encouraged to accept that they will undoubtedly experience negative emotions in
their life, no matter how happy or well-balanced they may be.
Instead of focusing on avoiding or denying the presence of the negative, DBT clients learn valuable skills
to keep their emotions in check and avoid emotional dysregulation.
People who are struggling with emotional dysregulation react to relatively mild negative events in an
emotionally exaggerated manner; they may cry, scream, accuse, or blame those around them, or engage in
passive-aggressive behaviors or other behaviors that can disrupt relationships and escalate conflict (PCH
Treatment Center, n.d.).
Recent research has proposed that emotional dysregulation, especially when present in those suffering from
BPD, is made up of four components:
1. Emotion sensitivity;
2. Heightened and unstable mood or emotions;
3. A lack of appropriate emotion regulation strategies;
4. A plethora of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (Carpenter & Trull, 2013).
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Download 3 Free
Emotional Intelligence
Exercises (PDF)
These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your
clients understand and use emotions advantageously.
Download PDF
The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, or ERQ, is the most popular emotion regulation scale among
psychology researchers. It was developed in 2003 by James Gross and John Oliver, based on five studies
spanning the question development, validity and reliability, and structure of the questionnaire.
The scale is composed of 10 items, rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The
scale covers two facets, the Cognitive Reappraisal facet and the Expressive Suppression facet, and produces
a separate score for each facet.
The six items that make up the Cognitive Reappraisal facet are as follows:
When I want to feel more positive emotion (such as joy or amusement), I change what I’m thinking
about;
When I want to feel less negative emotion (such as sadness or anger), I change what I’m thinking
about;
When I’m faced with a stressful situation, I make myself think about it in a way that helps me stay
calm;
When I want to feel more positive emotion, I change the way I’m thinking about the situation;
I control my emotions by changing the way I think about the situation I’m in;
When I want to feel less negative emotion, I change the way I’m thinking about the situation.
The four items that make up the Expressive Suppression facet include;
The Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, or IERQ, was developed to focus on the less attended
interpersonal emotion regulation processes, rather than interpersonal processes. This scale was developed
very recently (2016) by researchers Hofmann, Carpenter, and Curtiss.
It consists of 20 items and covers four factors, each containing five items rated on a scale from 1 (not true
for me at all) to 5 (extremely true for me).
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The four factors and their associated items are as follows:
Perspective Taking:
o It helps me deal with my depressed mood when others point out that things aren’t as bad as they
seem;
o Having people remind me that others are worse off helps me when I’m upset;
o When I am upset, others make me feel better by making me realize that things could be a lot worse;
o When I am annoyed, others can soothe me by telling me not to worry;
o Having people telling me not to worry can calm me down when I am anxious.
Soothing:
o I look for other people to offer me compassion when I’m upset;
o Feeling upset often causes me to seek out others who will express sympathy;
o I look to others for comfort when I feel upset;
o I look to other people when I feel depressed just to know that I am loved;
o When I feel sad, I seek out others for consolation.
Social Modeling:
o It makes me feel better to learn how others dealt with their emotions;
o Hearing another person’s thoughts on how to handle things helps me when I am worried;
o Seeing how others would handle the same situation helps me when I am frustrated;
o When I’m sad, it helps me to hear how others have dealt with similar feelings;
o If I’m upset, I like knowing what other people would do if they were in my situation.
This scale produces four scores, one for each subscale, and they are calculated by simply adding up the
score for each item. Each subscale has a minimum score of 5 and a maximum score of 25.
The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, or CERQ, is a scale for identifying the cognitive coping
strategies used after a negative experience (Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001). It differs from other
emotional regulation questionnaires in its focus on the individual’s thoughts and exclusion of the behavior;
it aims to find out what cognitive strategies the individual uses, rather than how they behave.
The scale is composed of 36 items rated on a scale from 1 ([almost] never) to 5 ([almost] always). It
includes nine separate cognitive coping strategies, with four items comprising each strategy.
Self-blame – I feel that I am the one who is responsible for what has happened;
Rumination – I want to understand why I feel the way I do about what I have experienced;
Positive Refocusing – I think of pleasant things that have nothing to do with it;
Refocus on Planning – I think about how I can best cope with the situation;
Positive Reappraisal – I think that I can become a stronger person as a result of what has happened;
Putting into Perspective – I think that it hasn’t been too bad compared to other things;
Catastrophizing – I often think that what I have experienced is much worse than what others have
experienced;
Other-blame – I think about the mistakes others have made in this matter.
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In this form of therapy, you won’t have to worry about vague
ideas surrounding healing and moving forward; your therapist
will have a detailed list of skills, strategies, and techniques
you can use to start feeling and doing better.
Primary emotions are often completely natural reactions to things around us, like being sad when a loved
one dies, or angry when someone is rude to us. However, secondary emotions are more dangerous and
more within our control; we generally have more of a choice about how to respond to the fact that we are
sad when someone dies.
Secondary emotions can push us towards behaviors that are destructive and maladaptive, making it
essential to learn how to accept your primary emotion without judging yourself for feeling it.
In DBT sessions, you may also discuss myths surrounding emotions, such as the idea that there is a “right”
and a “wrong” way to feel about certain events or situations. Our emotions are unique, organic experiences
that cannot be molded to fit ideas of what is “normal,” and to try can be harmful.
In fact, emotions are adaptive evolutionary traits—they developed because they helped us function better,
both by helping us communicate with others and by alerting us to things in our environment that are
beneficial or potentially problematic (Bray, 2013).
Learning to better understand, recognize, and label emotions is an enormously helpful skill to have, and not
only will it give you a good foundation for managing your emotions, but it will also help you understand
and empathize with others.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness can be described as living your life in the present instead of being stuck in the past or the
future (Tartakovsky, 2015). Practicing mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thought patterns,
our emotions, and how our thoughts and feelings affect our reactions to events.
There are two categories of mindfulness skills: “What” skills and “How” skills:
“What” skills:
o Observe;
o Describe;
o Participate.
“How” skills:
o Non-judgmentally;
o One-mindfully;
o Effectively (Dietz, 2012).
If you’re interested in learning more about how to practice mindfulness, check out our post on mindfulness
exercises and techniques here.
Perhaps the most important emotion regulation skill, learning to let go can be very difficult but is worth the
effort you invest.
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Humans have a tendency to become stuck when attempting to
process negative emotions. Instead of simply letting them go,
we often hold ever tighter to them, obsessing over every little
bit of our emotional experience and wondering why it’s
happening to us.
1. Observe your emotion. Acknowledge that it exists, stand back from it, and get yourself unstuck from it;
2. Try to experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going. You may find it helpful to concentrate on
some part of the emotion, like how your body is feeling or some image about it. For example, you
could use this imagery:
“Try to imagine an ocean wave flowing through you, but not so big that it knocks you over.
Don’t try to push the emotion away. This makes it bigger and increases our suffering. Don’t
reject the emotion. Don’t judge your emotion. It is not good or bad. It is just there. There are
no bad emotions, just emotions. Anger, fear, sadness are all painful emotions, but they are not
bad.
Everyone has them, and they are just as valid as the happy emotions. At the same time, do not
hang on to your emotion. Don’t rehearse it over and over to yourself. Don’t escalate it or
make it bigger. Sometimes when we feel a very painful emotion, like anger or a deep grief, we
hold on to it, or we intensify it, making it stronger and stronger, in our efforts to deal with it
or to give it our full attention. Try not to do this. Just let it be however it is. This can result in
a lessening of the pain.”
3. Recognize that you are not your emotion. Your emotion is part of you, but it is not all of you. You are
more than your emotion;
4. Do not necessarily act on the emotion; having the emotion does not mean that you have to act. You
may just need to sit with the emotion. Often, acting can intensify and prolong the emotion;
5. Practice LOVING your emotions. This can be a difficult concept. Why would we want to love painful
emotions?
We can learn to love our emotions just the way we can learn to love (accept) anything else about ourselves
or our experience that we cannot change—our age, our height, freckles, the birds that sing early in the
morning and wake us up, the weather, the size of our feet, allergies, etc.
Remember that acceptance (love) and approval are two different things. You don’t have to like your
freckles, but they are there and you can’t change that, so if you just accept or love them, you will feel a lot
better than if you keep fighting the idea that they are there (Dietz, 2012).
With the holidays coming up, you might be visiting with family you don’t see in everyday life. These get-
togethers can be great opportunities to reconnect with loved ones, but they can also be stressful and
emotionally charged.
Follow these DBT self-help tips to get through your holiday visits with dignity and grace (Dietz, 2012).
We don’t make the best decisions when we are feeling sick, tired, or hungry, so eliminating these physical
issues will make it easier for you to maintain your emotional balance.
Perhaps most important of all, commit to maintaining and strengthening your current relationships with
family, friends, and anyone else you are likely to see on your holiday travels.
Be Unmindful of Worries
While you’re focusing on the positive, it will make the next suggestion easier to implement: putting your
worries and insecurities aside. Crowd out the negative in your head with all the positive that you can find.
Remind yourself that you deserve to have fun, to enjoy your time with friends, and to bask in the warmth of
a loving family. Make room in your mind for the positive, and the negative will have less space to fill
(Dietz, 2012).
STOPP
If you’re struggling with controlling your emotions, consider how to STOPP (Vivyan, 2015).
STOPP is a strategy that will help you in the heat of the moment when you are dealing with intense
emotions. It incorporates aspects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), DBT, and mindfulness
meditation to help you more effectively address and manage your emotional response to a challenging,
difficult, or rage-inducing incident.
S – Stop!
o Just pause for a moment.
T – Take a Breath
o Notice your breathing as you breathe in and out.
O – Observe
o What thoughts are going through your mind right now?
o Where is your focus of attention?
o What are you reacting to?
o What sensations do you notice in your body?
If you learn only one skill that will help you to more effectively regulate your emotions, this should be the
one you learn. Learning how to pause in between an intense emotional reaction and your ensuing actions is
one of the most valuable and life-changing skills that a person can have. Practice STOPPing, and you will
be in a great position to manage your most difficult emotions.
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There are also many techniques that on the surface seem like
they will help you keep your emotional balance but upon
further consideration reveal themselves to be unhealthy.
Different activities might work best for you, but these lists are
a good start if you are unsure where to begin separating
healthy from unhealthy activities.
Exercising;
Writing in a journal;
Meditation;
Therapy;
Paying attention to negative thoughts that occur before or after strong emotions;
These activities are healthy because they not only contribute to better management of your emotions, they
do not cause you any harm.
Unhealthy activities that may seem like they help, but actually hurt, include:
Self-injury;
Excessive social media use, to the exclusion of other responsibilities (Rolston & Lloyd-Richardson,
n.d.).
These activities tend to feel good and help in the moment, as well as provide a better strategy than “total
avoidance” of situations that you inevitably will have to face.
When you are tempted to engage in an unhealthy activity, consider an activity that builds a sense of
achievement instead. Try an activity that will result in you learning something new or developing a new
skill, and allow yourself the space to build on it every day.
Doing something positive and fulfilling like this can not only increase your skills and boost your positive
emotions but will also leave less room for negative emotions (Rolston & Lloyd-Richardson, n.d.).
VIDEO
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Below are eight of the best worksheets, handouts, and emotion pictures available.
This worksheet helps you to identify and understand a situation or emotion you are struggling to accept.
Next, you describe the aspect of this situation that is difficult for you to accept.
After describing the reality, it asks you to think about the antecedents – or causes – that came before that
reality (hint: many of them you will find to be outside of your control).
Next, you practice radical acceptance with your whole being (mentally, physically, and spiritually),
describing how you achieved this. The worksheet encourages you to try the following:
“Inhale deeply, settle into an accepting, open position. Become aware of your thoughts and emotions that
struggle with your reality – then release them. Use acceptance techniques such as visualization, awareness
exercises, or affirmations. Concentrate on a mantra of acceptance, such as “That’s just how it is,” or “All
is the way it should be.’”
Finally, you rate your ability to handle the distress of this difficult situation both before and after practicing
radical acceptance, on a scale from 0 (you just can’t take it) to 10 (total acceptance of reality).
Interpersonal Skills Acronyms lists the DBT skills related to interpersonal effectiveness, including objective
effectiveness, relationship effectiveness, and self-respect effectiveness, and also provides useful tips to put
these skills into practice.
The section on objective effectiveness skills (DEAR MAN) outlines each skill and includes the following
tips for building and using them:
Describe
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Express
Let others know how a situation makes you feel by clearly expressing your feelings;
Assert
Don’t beat around the bush—say what you need to say;
Don’t say: “Oh, well, I don’t know if I can cook tonight or not;”
Reinforce
Reward people who respond well, and reinforce why your desired outcome is positive;
Mindful
Don’t forget the objective of the interaction;
It can be easy to get sidetracked into harmful arguments and lose focus.
Appear
Appear confident;
Negotiate
No one can have everything they want out of their interactions all the time;
Be open to negotiation;
Do say: “If you wash the dishes, I’ll put them away.”
Under the Relationship Effectiveness (GIVE) skills section, the handout lists the following:
Gentle
Don’t attack, threaten, or express judgment during your interactions;
Interested
Show interest by listening to the other person without interrupting.
Validate
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Be outwardly validating to the other person’s thoughts and feelings;
Acknowledge their feelings, recognize when your requests are demanding, and respect their
opinions.
Easy
Have an easy attitude;
Finally, these skills are listed under the Self-Respect Effectiveness (FAST) section:
Fair
Be fair; not only to others but also to yourself.
Apologies
Don’t apologize unless it’s warranted;
Stick to Values
Don’t compromise your values just to be liked or to get what you want;
Truthful
Avoid dishonesty such as exaggeration, acting helpless (as a form of manipulation), or outright lying.
It may be helpful to refer to this handout when you are faced with a situation in which you struggle to stick
to your standards.
The quick reminder and helpful suggestions can make sure you get back on the right track.
This worksheet can help you enhance your client’s awareness of action tendencies that stem from their
emotions – both positive and negative.
The activity helps you guide your client through two main steps, and a debrief for each.
Use Part One, a guided meditation, to help your client identify how they respond to their emotions. Briefly,
you will:
Invite them to close their eyes, recalling a recent time where they struggled with a tough emotion.
One example might be a disagreement with a loved one;
Encourage them to picture the difficult situation and relive it as much as possible. Where were they?
Who were they with?
Ask them to take note of the strongest emotion or feeling that arose from the situation, locating it if
possible in their body. They will ideally be able to label it.
Assist them in exploring their instinctive responses to the emotion. What do they feel like doing
now? Note that this is not about how they reacted at the time, but what want to do in the moment as
they revisit this experience.
Part Two takes your client through a similar guided meditation, but this time they will explore action
tendencies that are related to a positive emotion instead. This allows you and your client to compare and
contrast the two – how were they different? What did they notice about each?
This exercise can help your client connect the dots between a galvanizing event and the reaction they had to
the event. Among other things, it can be particularly useful for clients who would like to target their
impulsive tendencies or urges. The full Exploring Action Tendencies worksheet can be accessed in
the Positive Psychology Toolkit©.
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This is another great handout for reminding yourself of the tools at your disposal to aid you in regulating
your emotions.
The handout lists four skills that you can apply to improve your emotion regulation and provides
suggestions on implementing these skills.
Opposite Action
The first skill is Opposite Action, which can help you stop an intense or highly charged emotion in its
tracks.
Emotions often come with a specific behavior, like arguments following anger, or withdrawal resulting
from sadness. However, we often assume the relationship is from the emotion to behavior, rather than the
other way around.
Actually, it is possible to invoke an emotion by engaging in a behavior that is associated with that particular
emotion.
Instead of doing what you would usually do when you are feeling a certain way, try doing the opposite
action. If you’re angry, try talking quietly instead of yelling. If you are sad, try chatting with friends instead
of withdrawing from them.
This skill will help you to identify this scenario right when it’s happening, and then help you reduce the
intensity of the emotions.
P.L.E.A.S.E.
The P.LE.A.S.E. skill is another skill that acknowledges the link between body and brain. You will likely
find it much easier to manage your emotions if you also manage your health and your body.
Remember to:
E – Eat Healthily;
S – Sleep Well;
E – Exercise.
Follow these suggestions to keep your body healthy and happy, which makes it easier to keep your mind
happy and healthy.
If you notice you are paying too much attention to the negative, pause and refocus onto the positive. You
can practice by doing one small, positive activity every day, focusing on the good parts of the activity as
you do it. Ignore minor issues and notice the enjoyment, pleasure, and fun!
Positive Activities Include an Unrushed Meal. Image by Maggie Morrill from Pixaby.
Watch a movie;
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Visit a local attraction like a zoo or museum;
Go for a walk;
Have a picnic;
The easy-to-identify symbols make understanding the zones simple for children, and intuitive for anyone
who has paid attention to the world outside of their car!
The Rest Area/Blue Zone is where the individual is least energetic or purposeful and includes these
emotions:
Sad;
Tired;
Sick;
Bored.
The Go/Green Zone (the place you want to be!) is the happy medium and represents positive emotions and
a balance between extremes. These emotions fall into the Go/Green Zone:
Calm;
Ready to learn;
Happy;
Okay.
In the Slow/Yellow Zone, things are getting a bit troubling. Emotions include:
Silly or wiggly;
Frustrated;
Hyper;
Upset.
Finally, the Stop/Red Zone is the most problematic, with emotions and behaviors like:
Mad;
Angry;
Yelling;
Hitting.
Once the child has identified their emotion and figured out which zone they are in, there is a handy list of
suggestions to help them get into, or stay in, the Go/Green Zone, including:
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Drink water;
Count to 10;
Do wall pushups;
Use fidgets;
Draw;
Write;
Talk to an adult;
Self-talk;
Volcano breaths;
Do stretches;
Listen to music;
This image included below is an excellent addition to any classroom, daycare, or other location where
young children are likely to be.
This bonus image adds some more feelings to each zone, including:
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This image is another that would make a great poster for a classroom, especially with a laminate finish and
an erasable marker for drawing expressions at the bottom.
It poses a fairly simple question: How are you feeling? If the reader is not sure how they are feeling, it can
guide the reader in identifying his or her emotion.
Besides the titular “How are you feeling?” question, it also asks three follow-up questions:
Good or great;
Okay;
Friendly;
Loving;
Energetic;
Hopeful;
Stressed;
Mad;
Confused;
Lonely;
Sad;
Shocked;
Feelings Keep Changing (you feel a lot of different ways at once, or your feelings keep changing).
Finally, it leaves room for the reader to draw a new emotion that they would like to feel, and give the
emotion a label. This can be a fun activity for young children, and it encourages them to think about their
emotions.
Although this image was developed with children in mind, it can be adapted to be a great guide for people
of any age who need help in determining how big their problem is.
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It can be all too easy to blow problems out of proportion, or “make mountains out of molehills.” If you find
yourself struggling with this a lot, this emotion picture may be able to help you.
It lists the five levels a problem can potentially be on, starting with the most serious and moving towards
the least serious.
Level 2: Little Problem – Forgetting homework, lost supplies, can’t decide what to do
Potential emotions: Unhappy, disappointed, annoyed, embarrassed
Level 1: Glitch – Losing a game, not getting the supply you want, being late
Potential emotions: Okay, content, fine, calm
Use this handy guide to help children (or yourself!) to identify where the problem is, and decide how to
best respond to the situation.
Traffic Light
The final image would be perfect for very young children, as it is based on a concept that is very easy to
understand: a traffic light.
Print an image of a traffic light, and help the small children in your life determine the difference between
“Green” emotions like happiness, contentment, and feeling at peace; “Yellow” emotions like boredom,
irritation, and sadness, and; “Red” emotions like anger, grief, and shame.
Explain that we all experience a wide range of emotions, and it’s okay to feel however they feel. However,
it is best for them if they figure out how to keep their emotions within Green and sometimes Yellow while
limiting the time they spend in Red.
Tell them there are many ways to do this. This can be an excellent lead-in for mindfulness practice or any
other emotion regulation skill development!
17 Exercises To Develop
Emotional Intelligence
These 17 Emotional Intelligence Exercises [PDF] will help
others strengthen their relationships, lower stress, and enhance
their wellbeing through improved EQ.
Download Now
A Take-Home Message
This piece first described emotion regulation, then emotion dysregulation, and then explored the ways in
which you can move towards the former from the latter.
I hope you found this information enlightening and useful, and I hope you get some good use out of the
resources collected here.
Have you ever worked on your emotion regulation skills? What techniques did you use? Would you use any
of these techniques? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Thanks for reading, and see you next time!
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Emotional Intelligence
Exercises for free.
REFERENCES
Bray, S. (2013). Emotion regulation in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Good Therapy. Retrieved
from https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/emotion-regulation-dialectical-behavior-therapy-dbt-
0318135.
Dietz, L. (2012). DBT skills list. DBT Self Help. Retrieved from
www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/dbt_skills_list.html.
Garnefski, N., Kraaij, V., & Spinhoven, P. (2001). Negative life events, cognitive emotion
regulation, and emotional problems. Personality and Individual Differences, 30, 1311–1327.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes:
Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 85, 348-362.
Hofmann, S. G., Carpenter, J. K., & Curtiss, J. (2016). Interpersonal Emotion Regulation
Questionnaire (IERQ): Scale development and psychometric characteristics. Cognitve Theory
and Research, 40, 341-356.
www.kidmechanix.com.
Rolston, A., & Lloyd-Richardson, E. (n.d.). What is emotion regulation and how do we do
it? Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery. Retrieved from
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brief.pdf.
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