استراتژی تنظیم احساسات شناختی: تفاوت جنسیت و ارتباط با نگرانی

Research generally supports differences in the prevalence of GAD and reports of excessive worry between men and women. Psychosocial theories espouse individual vulnerability factors as correlates of anxiety and in turn related to gender differences. Emotion regulation is one vulnerability factor that has shown involvement in the development, exacerbation, and/or maintenance of anxiety, although there is insufficient evidence of this direct contribution to observed gender differences in anxiety. Using a sample of 1080 young adults, the current study examines the differential use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies between males and females and the subsequent effect on worry. Results of the present study provide tentative support for differential cognitive emotion regulation strategies between gender as a vulnerability to increased worry and potentially GAD. Specifically, males and females significantly differed in the endorsement of use of rumination, putting problems into perspective and blaming others as cognitive emotion regulation strategies.

The extant literature on the gender distribution of the prevalence of anxiety disorders suggests that baserates for specific disorders are higher for women than men. Specifically, the baserate of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in females is approximately twice the reported baserate of the disorder in men (Wittchen, Zhao, Kessler, & Eaton, 1994). Biological theories suggest that certain biological or genetic characteristics unique to women, such as hormones, are key in the development of anxiety symptomatology (Seeman, 1997). In contrast, psychosocial theories espouse individual vulnerability factors as correlates of anxiety and in turn related to gender differences (Lewinsohn, Gotlib, Lewinsohn, Seeley, & Allen, 1998). Vulnerability factors such as cognitive processes (Beck et al., 2005 and Riskind, 1997), personality (Brandes and Bienvenu, 2006 and Clark et al., 1994), and emotion regulation (Amstadter, 2008 and Martin and Dahlen, 2005) have been shown to be involved in the development, exacerbation, and/or maintenance of anxiety, although there is insufficient evidence of this direct contribution to observed gender differences in anxiety (Garnefski, Teerds, Kraaij, Legerstee, & van den Kommer, 2004). Emotional regulation is conceptualized as a broad construct encompassing a number of regulatory processes, including the regulation of the experience of emotion as well as the regulation of the underlying features of emotion such as physiological reactivity, social, behavioral, and cognitive processes (Garnefski et al., 2001, Garnefski et al., 2002 and Thompson and Calkins, 1996). Several definitions of emotion regulation ranging from modulation of emotional intensity and arousal (e.g., Gross & Thompson, 2007) to the ability to control behavioral responses to negative emotions have been examined across the full spectrum of anxiety disorders (e.g., Amstadter, 2008 and Campbell-Sills et al., 2006) and specifically GAD (e.g., Decker et al., 2008, McLaughlin et al., 2007, Mennin et al., 2005 and Salters-Pedneault et al., 2006). A subset of these emotion regulation processes include the conscious cognitive regulation processes (Garnefski et al., 2001). Cognitive emotion regulation can generally be described as the management of emotionally arousing information with conscious cognitive strategies (Thompson, 1991). Such cognitive strategies are crucial in the management of threatening or stressful events by assisting individuals to manage, regulate, and control over emotions (Garnefski et al., 2001). Recent research has begun to examine differences between males and females on the use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies (Garnefski et al., 2004 and Martin and Dahlen, 2005). Garnefski et al. (2004) found that males and females reported differential reliance on a number of strategies, with the most striking differences for rumination, positive refocusing, and catastrophizing. For all three of these significant differences, females reported using such strategies more often. For both males and females, it appears the increased use of positive reframing during stressful situations is related to decreased levels of depression whereas those who engage in rumination or catastrophizing when confronted with stressful situations reported increases in symptoms of depression. Martin and Dahlen (2005), also reported that females endorsed significantly higher levels of a number of cognitive coping strategies. Worry is intricately linked to anxiety in general and to Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) specifically. Excessive worry is the core symptom of GAD and has been shown to effectively discriminate GAD from other anxiety disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2001). Borkovec, Davey, and Tallis (1994) describe worry as the cognitive component of anxiety, often in the form of verbal thoughts as opposed to the cognitive, behavioral, and physiological presentation of anxious symptomatology. Borkovec, Ray, and Stöber (1998) also suggest that the cognitive phenomena of worry is distinct from the physiological and behavioral manifestations of anxiety and related disorders. The relationship between gender and worry has largely been ignored in the empirical literature and the available data is often mixed. In studies in which gender differences in worry were directly examined, women reported significantly higher levels of excessive worry than their male counterparts (Dugas et al., 1997, Dugas et al., 2001, Lewinsohn et al., 1998, McCann et al., 1991, Robichaud et al., 2003 and Stavosky and Borkovec, 1988). Other research reports mixed results, suggesting no differences in worry across males and females (i.e. Brown et al., 1992 and Tallis et al., 1994). Given the increased rates of GAD in women and excessive worry as the primary symptom of GAD, worry itself is an important construct for the understanding of GAD and other anxiety disorders. While these are important findings, a more salient question may be whether the differences in the use of cognitive coping strategies are differentially related to anxiety and worry in men and women. The identification of discrepancies on the use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies by males and females may provide useful information by which to understand the heightened vulnerability of women for excessive worry and GAD. The current study examines differential use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies across males and females and their subsequent effects in worry.

In conclusion, results of the present study provide tentative support for differential cognitive emotion regulation strategies between gender as a vulnerability to increased worry. Gaining a better understanding of possibly different etiologies of worry is salient to the conceptualization of GAD and its subsequent treatment. While these are interesting initial findings, further research must be conducted to examine the relations between emotion regulation, gender, and worry.