Emotional Regulation and Depression: A Potential Mediator between Heart and Mind

Summary & key facts

The authors looked across many studies to see how managing emotions is linked to depression and to physical illness. They found that the way people handle emotions can help explain why some people develop depression or stress-related health problems. Strategies that change how you think about a situation tend to lower stressful emotions, while repeatedly dwelling on feelings or trying to push them down is tied to more depression and to changes in the body’s stress system. The review also points to therapies that teach better emotion skills as a promising way to help, but it does not prove cause and effect.

Key facts:

• The paper is a narrative review, which means the authors summarized many existing studies rather than running a new experiment or trial.
• Emotional regulation acts as a mediator, meaning the ways people manage feelings can help explain why stress sometimes leads to depression and to physical health problems.
• Using adaptive strategies like reappraisal (that is, changing how you think about a situation) is linked with smaller stress-driven emotional reactions and may lower the chance of stress-related physical disorders.
• Dysfunctional strategies such as rumination (repeatedly thinking about negative feelings) and emotion suppression (trying to hide or push feelings away) are linked to the development of depression and to worse physical health outcomes.
• Research discussed in the review suggests rumination and depression affect both thinking (for example, making it harder to process negative information clearly) and the body’s stress system. The body’s stress system, called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, can become overactive and produce higher amounts of the stress hormone cortisol.
• The authors highlight therapies that focus on emotion skills—such as mindfulness-based therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and emotion regulation therapy—as important approaches to study further, but the review itself does not prove these treatments will prevent or cure depression.

Abstract

A narrative review of the major evidence concerning the relationship between emotional regulation and depression was conducted. The literature demonstrates a mediating role of emotional regulation in the development of depression and physical illness. Literature suggests in fact that the employment of adaptive emotional regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) causes a reduction of stress-elicited emotions leading to physical disorders. Conversely, dysfunctional emotional regulation strategies and, in particular, rumination and emotion suppression appear to be influential in the pathogenesis of depression and physiological disease. More specifically, the evidence suggests that depression and rumination affect both cognitive (e.g., impaired ability to process negative information) and neurobiological mechanisms (e.g., hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis overactivation and higher rates of cortisol production). Understanding the factors that govern the variety of health outcomes that different people experience following exposure to stress has important implications for the development of effective emotion-regulation interventional approaches (e.g., mindfulness-based therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and emotion regulation therapy).

Topics

Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Stress Responses and Cortisol

Categories

Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Affect (linguistics) Clinical psychology Cognition Cognitive reappraisal Communication Depression (economics) Disease Dysfunctional family Economics Emotional regulation Internal medicine Macroeconomics Medicine Mindfulness Psychiatry Psychology Psychotherapist Rumination

Conditions & symptoms

Depression Sadness or low mood