Emotion Regulation in Depression and Anxiety: Examining Diagnostic Specificity and Stability of Strategy Use
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Emotion Regulation in Depression and Anxiety: Examining Diagnostic Specificity and Stability of Strategy Use Catherine D’Avanzato • Jutta Joormann Matthias Siemer • Ian H. Gotlib
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Published online: 4 April 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Many psychological disorders are characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation. It is unclear, however, whether different disorders are associated with the use of specific emotion regulation strategies, and whether these difficulties are stable characteristics that are evident even after recovery. It is also unclear whether the use of specific strategies is problematic across all disorders or whether disorders differ in how strongly strategy use is associated with symptom severity. This study investigated (1) the specificity of use of emotion regulation strategies in individuals diagnosed with current major depressive disorder (MDD), with social anxiety disorder (SAD), and in neverdisordered controls (CTL); and (2) the stability of strategy use in formerly depressed participants (i.e., remitted; RMD). Path analysis was conducted to examine the relation between strategy use and symptom severity across diagnostic groups. Compared to the CTL group, participants in both clinical groups endorsed more frequent use of rumination and expressive suppression, and less frequent use of reappraisal. Specific to SAD were even higher levels of expressive suppression relative to MDD, as well as a stronger relation between rumination and anxiety levels. In contrast, specific to MDD were even higher levels of rumination and lower levels of reappraisal. Interestingly, elevated rumination, but not decreased reappraisal, was found to be a stable feature characterizing remitted depressed individuals. These results may provide insight C. D’Avanzato (&) J. Joormann M. Siemer Department of Psychology, University of Miami, 5665 Ponce de Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. H. Gotlib Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
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into ways in which emotion regulation strategy use maintains psychological disorders. Keywords Depression Social anxiety Emotion regulation Rumination Suppression Reappraisal
Introduction Difficulties in emotion regulation are proposed to be associated with a range of emotional disorders such as anxiety disorders and major depressive disorder (MDD) (Campbell-Sills and Barlow 2007; Hofmann et al. 2012; Mennin and Farach 2007). Emotion regulation is defined as the use of cognitive or behavioral strategies in order to modify the circumstances in which an emotion occurs, the experience of an emotional response (including its intensity and duration), or the way in which an emotion is overtly expressed (Gross 2002). Previous research suggests that emotion regulation strategies differ in their effectiveness in reducing negative affect (e.g. Gross 1998; Campbell-Sills et al. 2006b); consequently, these strategies may also differ in their association with emot
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