Individual beliefs about emotion and perceptions of belief stability are associated with symptoms of psychopathology and emotional processes

Defining distress tolerance in a structural model of Big Five personality domains

OBJECTIVE

Distress tolerance (DT)-willingness to face internal discomforts-has a fuzzy boundary with neuroticism (low emotional stability), raising questions about its independent role in models of personality and mental health.

METHOD

We investigated DT's overlap with neuroticism and other Big Five factors in a structural model of personality and personality disorder features in samples of university students (N = 1025), emotional disorder patients (N = 225), and substance-use patients (N = 210).

RESULTS

In exploratory factor analyses, we found that DT indicators clustered with neuroticism and were essentially unrelated to other Big Five domains. Big Five personality dimensions collectively explained approximately 40%-70% of variation in DT, across different samples and methods of quantifying shared variance.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that DT and neuroticism are near neighbors in empirical space and speculate that much of the observed correlation between DT and mental health outcomes in the literature may be carried by shared neuroticism variance. We suggest that clearer distinctions between the two constructs in empirical research could improve our understanding of DT's unique role in the development and treatment of psychopathology.

Examining state self-criticism and self-efficacy as factors underlying hopelessness and suicidal ideation

INTRODUCTION

When people feel hopeless, they are more likely to think about suicide. Prior work has shown that both hopelessness and suicidal ideation fluctuate over time; however, there are likely other contextual factors underlying increased hopelessness and suicidal ideation in moments of time.

METHOD

In two studies using retrospective recall of a real event (Study 1, n = 268) and an experimental imaginal vignette design (Study 2, n = 356), we examined self-criticism and self-efficacy for self-regulation as crucial factors underlying hopelessness in people vulnerable to suicidal ideation.

RESULTS

In both studies, greater state self-criticism and lower state self-efficacy were associated with greater hopelessness. In Study 2, we also measured suicidal ideation, and found that higher self-criticism and lower self-efficacy for self-regulation scores were associated with greater suicidal ideation, even when controlling for negative affect. Evidence of an interaction between self-criticism and self-efficacy was found with scores in Study 2 but not in Study 1; specifically, lower self-efficacy was associated with greater ideation when self-criticism was high but not when self-criticism was low.

CONCLUSION

Overall, results support self-criticism and self-efficacy as important contextual factors underlying hopelessness and suicidal ideation and attending to the potential interactive effect between self-criticism and self-efficacy.

Emotion beliefs: conceptual review and compendium

Laypeople hold richly divergent beliefs about emotion, and these beliefs are consequential. Specific forms of belief that have been investigated include the usefulness, contagiousness, duration, dependence upon intersubjective experience, cognitively mediated properties, malleability, and hindering properties of emotion, just to name a few. Progress in this emerging sub-field of research has been hampered by the lack of a widely accepted definition of emotion belief able to capture all of these dimensions. Correspondingly, there has been a proliferation of different terminologies, constructs, and measures. The present review aims to address these obstacles by defining emotion belief, and subsequently re-considering existing constructs and measures that align with this definition. The latter is presented in the form of a comprehensive compendium of 21 different constructs and associated self-report measures that assess varying components of one's beliefs about emotions in general and/or about their own emotions, and an additional 5 scales that were designed to measure one's beliefs about another's emotions. From the more unified conceptualization of emotion belief presented here, critical areas of future research are highlighted.

Emotional regulation strategies in daily life: the intensity of emotions and regulation choice

Objective

Emotion regulation is an adaptive ability affecting people's physical and mental health, quality of life and functioning. In the present study we focused on the influence of the intensity of experienced emotions on emotion regulation strategies (ERS) that are applied in everyday life.

Methods

For 7 days the participants kept an online diary where every day they described the situation which had aroused their strongest negative emotions. Next, they identified the emotions, their intensity and the type of applied strategies (acceptance vs. reappraisal vs. rumination vs. distraction vs. suppression). The study involved 88 people N = 88, which gives 538 observations.

Results

The obtained results indicate that the intensity of emotions affects the choice of regulation strategies. When the intensity increases, people are more likely to choose the rumination strategy and less likely to choose the reappraisal strategy. However, the expected relationship between the intensity and the number of regulation strategies was not confirmed. In turn, it was gender (male) that turned out to be associated with a greater number of strategies used.

Conclusion

The concern of this research was to look at making regulatory decisions in personally relevant and complex everyday situations. Although the emotions experienced in response to a difficult situation were varied, the intensity of the emotional experience was an important factor determining the choice of a regulation strategy. It indicates that this emotional dimension is a basic and determining aspect in people's regulatory capabilities. These results also indicate that perhaps men in a situation perceived as stressful and worthy of emotional involvement use more regulatory strategies than women. These findings may find an application in all kinds of psychological interventions (e.g., psychotherapy, anger management therapies).

Lay perspectives on emotion: past, present, and future research directions

Empirical research has demonstrated that individuals vary widely in how they view their emotions. We call the viewpoints that individuals have towards their emotions emotion perspectives. While many subdisciplines of psychology, such as social psychology and clinical psychology, have studied this topic, research thus far can be siloed, despite overlap in terms and constructs. The goal of the current special issue and this introduction is to describe the state of research on emotion perspectives, highlight common themes in streams of emotion perspective research, and present future directions for investigation. The first portion of this introduction to the special issue provides a basic review of emotion perspective research, spotlighting topics such as emotion beliefs, emotion mindsets, lay theories of emotion, and attitudes toward emotion. The second portion of the introduction presents themes that cut across papers in the special issue, with a discussion of future research directions throughout. The goal of this introduction and special issue is to serve as a guide for greater integration in emotion perspective research and to provide a roadmap for emotion perspective research moving forward.

Childhood maltreatment and emotional distress: The role of beliefs about emotion and psychological inflexibility

The current study aimed to investigate the mediating role of negative beliefs about emotion and psychological inflexibility on the relationship between childhood maltreatment and emotional distress. A total of 519 participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21), the Leahy Emotional Schema Scale II (LESS-II), and the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II). All scales were significantly correlated. Two mediation analyses were tested. In the first model negative beliefs about emotion and psychological inflexibility mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and emotional distress measured by DASS-21 total score. In the second model, negative beliefs about emotion and psychological inflexibility mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and depression, anxiety, and stress measured by the subscales of DASS-21. Results suggest that maltreatment in childhood is associated with the individuals' approaches, plans and strategies in response to emotions, and psychological inflexibility which together further determine emotional distress.