GET is a 6-session intervention delivered over 8 weeks to enhance self-regulation through improved goal navigation skills, improved sense of meaning and purpose, and better ability to regulate specific emotional responses. GET has an emphasis on goal navigation skill building. This includes work on goal setting with a focus on assessing progress toward achieving specific, realistic, and measurable goals. Emotion regulation components include basic cognitive restructuring skills, cognitive distancing, and coping efficacy skills (matching the correct coping skill to specific circumstances).

ISP includes 6-sessions of individual supportive psychotherapy and includes components of genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding through reassurance, explanation, guidance, suggestion, encouragement, affecting changes in patient's environment, and permission for catharsis. ISP emphasizes maintaining focus on the cancer experience, supporting participants in the "here and now," fostering expression of emotion and discussion of difficult topics, and creating a sense of being understood.

Six sessions delivered individually over 8 weeks

The HADS was developed to assess anxiety and depression in medical patients. It purposefully excluded somatic symptoms (e.g., sleep disturbance) to reduce confounding psychological symptoms with disease or treatment. The HADS has become a "benchmark" measure of anxiety and depression among diverse clinical and nonclinical hospital populations, including individuals diagnosed with cancer. The HADS is a 14-item self-administered questionnaire, with 7 items assigned to each the HADS-Anxiety and HADS-Depression subscales. Each item is rated on a 4-point response scale (from 0 to 3). Subscale scores are typically categorized to indicate the level of anxiety or depression experienced where scores of less than 8 are categorized as normal, scores of 8-10 as borderline, and scores of 11-21 as clinical. A number of psychometric studies have established the scale's strengths, including its brevity, reliability, and validity and availability of comparison scores across different populations.

The investigators will focus on four biomarkers, IIL-6, IL-1ra, CRP, sTNFαRII, that indicate systemic inflammation and are associated with distress symptoms and emotion regulation. Levels will be assessed from plasma. Cytokine levels will be determined by immunosorbent assay (ELISA) according to assay manufacturer's protocols. All samples will be run in duplicate, and assays will be repeated on two separate days; intra-assay and interassay mean levels will be used in all analyses.

Diurnal rhythm in salivary cortisol will be measured over three days at each assessment. Participants will collect saliva samples in their natural environment upon awakening, 30 minutes later, 8 hours later, and at bedtime. Participants will complete a diary to assess relevant health behaviors (e.g., caffeine, tobacco, alcohol consumption; physical activity, sleep) as well as daily stress. They will be instructed to avoid brushing their teeth, eating, or drinking within 20 minutes before sampling. Participants will keep samples refrigerated prior to returning them to the research laboratory and returned salivettes will be stored in a -20-degree Celsius freezer until analyzed. After data collection is complete, salivary cortisol will be analyzed with a time-resolved fluorescence immunoassay at the IISBR laboratory at UC Irvine. Several indices will be computed including diurnal slope, area under the daily curve, cortisol awakening response, and total daily cortisol output.

Emotion regulation skills will be measured by the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). The ERQ is a widely used 10-item scale designed to measure respondents' tendency to regulate their emotions in two ways: (1) Cognitive Reappraisal and (2) Expressive Suppression. Respondents answer each item on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The ERQ is widely used in the context of clinical treatment trials and has well established validity, reliability, and factor structure (Goldin, Manber-Ball, Werner, Heimberg, & Gross, 2009; Gross & John, 2003).