Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review

Summary & key facts

Researchers combined results from many studies to see how six common ways of handling emotions relate to symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating problems, and substance problems. They found that habitually replaying negative thoughts (rumination) showed the strongest link to symptoms. Avoiding feelings, trying to solve problems, and pushing feelings down (suppression) showed moderate links. Changing how you think about a situation (reappraisal) and accepting feelings showed weaker links than the authors expected. These are associations across studies, not proof that any strategy causes mental health problems.

Key facts:

• The team pooled 241 effect sizes from 114 studies that measured people’s usual ways of handling emotions and their mental-health symptoms.
• They examined six emotion-regulation strategies: acceptance (letting feelings be), avoidance (trying to escape feelings), problem solving (trying to fix the cause), reappraisal (changing how you think about a situation), rumination (repeati
• Across the four disorder groups, rumination had the largest relationship with symptoms, meaning it was most consistently linked to worse symptoms across studies.
• Avoidance, problem solving, and suppression showed medium to large relationships with symptoms, while reappraisal and acceptance showed smaller relationships than expected given their role in therapies.
• Disorders that involve inward-focused symptoms, like anxiety and depression, were more consistently linked to emotion-regulation strategies than disorders that involve outward behaviors, like substance problems.
• Whether the people studied were clinical patients or members of the general public changed how strong the relationships were. This means results depend on who was studied.
• Because this analysis combined correlational studies, the results show links between strategies and symptoms but do not prove that the strategies cause the symptoms.

Topics

Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Mental Health Research Topics

Categories

Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Anxiety Clinical psychology Cognition Cognitive reappraisal Demography Developmental psychology Eating disorders Epistemology Expressive Suppression Internal medicine Medicine Meta-analysis Normative Philosophy Population Psychiatry Psychology Psychopathology Rumination Sociology

Conditions & symptoms

Anxiety Depression Eating Disorder Substance abuse disorder Addiction or harmful habbits Anxiety or worry Sadness or low mood