Profiles of emotion regulation: Understanding regulatory patterns and the implications for posttraumatic stress

Abstract

Trauma survivors often experience posttraumatic stress (PTS) and report concurrent difficulties with emotion regulation (ER). Although individuals typically use multiple regulatory strategies to manage emotion, no studies yet examine the influence of a constellation of strategies on PTS in a community sample. We assessed six ER strategies and investigated whether specific profiles of ER (i.e. the typical pattern of regulation, determined by how often each strategy is used) were related to PTS. A hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that four distinct profiles were present: Adaptive Regulation, Active Regulation, Detached Regulation, and Maladaptive Regulation. Further analyses revealed that an individual's profile was not related to frequency of past trauma, but had the power to differentiate symptom severity for overall PTS and each symptom cluster of posttraumatic stress disorder. These findings highlight how profiles characterising multiple regulatory strategies offer a more complete understanding of the ways ER can account for PTS.

Keywords: Emotion regulation; posttraumatic stress; regulatory profiles; trauma.