Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review
Section snippets
Models of emotion regulation
Emotion regulation has been conceptualized as processes through which individuals modulate their emotions consciously and nonconsciously (Bargh and Williams, 2007, Rottenberg and Gross, 2003) to appropriately respond to environmental demands (Campbell-Sills and Barlow, 2007, Cole et al., 2004, Gratz and Roemer, 2004, Gross, 1998, Gross and Munoz, 1995, Thompson, 1994). Individuals deploy regulatory strategies to modify the magnitude and/or type of their emotional experience or the
Measuring emotion regulation
Along with the increased interest in individual differences in emotion regulation in recent years, there has been a proliferation of self-report measures of emotion-regulation strategies (see Table 1). These measures have advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, because self-report measures are easy and quick to administer, there is a sufficient body of research from which to draw data for this meta-analysis. In addition, self-report scales typically measure dispositional tendencies
Literature searches
We searched for studies that provided data on at least one of the disorders and one of the regulatory strategies of interest, regardless of whether the study of these constructs was a central focus of the study. We conducted systematic searches for articles published between 1985 and July 2008 using PsycInfo and Medline. We chose 1985 as a beginning point because, with the exception of some studies of problem solving and avoidance coping, there was little work on what is now referred to as
Regulation strategies across disorders
We calculated the random-effect model of the correlation coefficients for each regulatory strategy collapsed across the disorder clusters (see Table 3). As predicted, the following strategies were positively associated with psychopathology: avoidance (r = .38; k = 37; 95% CI = [.33; .44]) and suppression (r = .34; k = 51; 95% CI = [.28; .39]), both with magnitudes from medium to large, and rumination with a large magnitude (r = .49; k = 89; 95% CI = [.45; .52]). Conversely, the following strategies were
Review of longitudinal studies
As noted earlier, there was a great deal of heterogeneity in the designs of longitudinal studies examining the relationships between one of the emotion-regulation variables of interest and one of the outcome variables of interest. Further, with the exception of rumination, there was a small number of longitudinal studies of any of the other emotion-regulation variables. We included the baseline bivariate correlations between emotion-regulation variables and psychopathology variables from these
Discussion
In the present meta-analytic review, we evaluated the relationship between six widely studied emotion-regulation strategies and four psychopathology groups. Each emotion-regulation strategy was associated with overall psychopathology in the predicted direction: maladaptive strategies (i.e., rumination, avoidance, suppression) were associated with more psychopathology and adaptive strategies (i.e., acceptance, reappraisal, and problem solving) with less psychopathology. However, interesting
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