Enhancing well-being at work: The role of emotion regulation skills as personal resources

Abstract

Dealing with negative emotions is a crucial work demand, particularly for employees in health care. Job resources (e.g., autonomy, social support, or reward) but also personal resources (such as emotion regulation strategies) might reduce job stress and support well-being. Following this, the present study focused on strengthening emotion regulation as 1 way of dealing with high job demands. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of a standardized emotion regulation training (Affect Regulation Training [ART]; Berking, 2010) to improve emotion regulation skills and well-being of employees in elderly health care. Therefore, 96 elderly care workers filled out an established questionnaire of emotion regulation skills as well as a measure of well-being at pretreatment, posttreatment and at 6-month follow-up. The findings show that the ART fosters emotion regulation skills. In particularly, acceptance, tolerance, and modification of negative emotions was enhanced in the training groups in comparison to a control-group. Modification, meaning the ability to actively change emotions, improved even more over the follow-up-period. Simultaneously, well-being of participants increased over all measurement time points in the ART-group compared with the control-group. Additionally, the improvement in emotion regulation skills from pre to posttreatment was related to well-being at follow-up. In summary, our results support the ART as an effective intervention for dealing with negative emotions and to enhance well-being among employees in elderly care. (PsycINFO Database Record