5. Limitations and Implications
psychosis, hostility
RECRUITMENT
First, we encountered many difficulties in recruitment due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although our research team had spent around 20 days stationed in the outpatient units of two EASY program teams, few young adults and caregivers responded to our invitations after the waves of COVID-19. Many of them explicitly expressed their reservations about participating in a face-to-face caregiver program. The young adults were even less responsive to our invitations than the caregivers, although we offered incentives for participation. It is not certain that the results of our study can be generalized to other populations, particularly young adults in recovery, given the small sample. Further studies should develop more effective strategies to recruit participants, especially in collecting consent to use clinical records as one of the outcomes of the study.Second, in this paper we focus on reporting the immediate effects of the program outcomes. We still have not completed our follow-up data collection. It is uncertain whether the program will have sustainable effects 9 months after completion. Our research team plans to report the findings in a later manuscript. Last, the assessment of expressed emotions in this study was based on the perceptions of the young adults in recovery. We did not measure the perceptions of the caregivers. It is interesting that after the ordinary psychoeducation program, the ratings for over-involvement and hostility increased, while in the MBFPE group, these ratings decreased. Mindfulness skills might allow caregivers to gain new insights with non-judgmental attitudes into young adults with psychosis. Further studies of MBPs may apply different measures, such as the five-minute speech sample, a well-established behavioral coding to measure EEs [