تفاوت های جنسیت و سن در استراتژی های تنظیم احساسات و ارتباط آنها با نشانه های افسردگی

We examined differences between men and women, and between young, middle and older age adults in emotion regulation strategies (rumination, suppression, reappraisal, problem-solving, acceptance, social support) and the relationships between these strategies and depressive symptoms. Women were more likely than men to report using several different emotion regulation strategies, and these gender differences were significant even after statistically controlling for gender differences in depressive symptoms. Use of most strategies decreased with age, with two exceptions: (1) use of suppression increased with age for women but not for men and (2) use of acceptance did not decrease with age for women. Use of maladaptive strategies was associated with more depressive symptoms in all age groups and both genders, yet, the use of adaptive strategies generally was not related to lower levels depressive symptoms across groups.

The strategies people use to regulate their emotions are the focus of a great deal of recent theoretical and empirical work, and a number of specific strategies have been argued to be generally adaptive or maladaptive (see reviews in Gross and Thompson, 2007 and Kring and Sloan, 2010). A recent meta-analysis showed that rumination and suppression were correlated with greater symptoms of depression, anxiety, substance use, eating disorders with moderate to strong effect sizes across dozens of studies (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010). In contrast, positive reappraisal, problem-solving and acceptance were negatively related to psychopathology, albeit weakly and somewhat inconsistently. One question not addressed by the Aldao et al. (2010) meta-analysis is whether there are gender differences in adaptive or maladaptive strategies and their relationships to depressive symptoms. Thoits, 1991 and Thoits, 1994 found that women use a wider variety of both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies than men do. Similarly, a meta-analysis found significant gender differences in 11 of 17 coping strategies, with women reporting more use of all strategies than men (Tamres, Janicki, & Helgeson, 2002), including rumination, seeking social support, positive self-talk (or reappraisal), active coping and suppression. Tamres et al. (2002) noted, however, that women may have reported more use of coping strategies because they were experiencing more stress than men. They addressed this issue by testing whether gender differences in stressor appraisal moderated the gender difference in strategies. They found that for active coping, avoidance, positive reappraisal, and self-blame, women reported using the strategy more than men only in studies in which women appraised the stressor as more severe than men did, suggesting that gender differences in these strategies could be the result of gender differences in stressor appraisal. In contrast, the gender differences in rumination and social support seeking were not moderated by stressor appraisal. Although this analysis is informative, Tamres et al. (2002) were not able to directly control for gender differences in stressor appraisal when examining gender differences in strategy use. A goal of the current study is to examine whether gender differences in an array of emotion regulation strategies can be accounted for by gender differences in distress, specifically in depressive symptoms. If women do use both more adaptive and maladaptive strategies than men, might their use of adaptive strategies mitigate the negative effects of their use of maladaptive strategies? Aldao et al. (2010) found that adaptive strategies were only weakly related to depressive symptoms, while maladaptive strategies were robustly related to depressive symptoms. This suggests that, although women may use adaptive strategies more than men, this does not help prevent distress; in contrast, women’s use of maladaptive strategies more than men puts them at increased risk for distress. The present study examined whether the pattern of maladaptive strategies being more strongly related to depressive symptoms than adaptive strategies was consistent across gender. The vast majority of the adult studies in the meta-analysis by Aldao et al. (2010) were conducted with college students, also raising the question of whether the trends found are consistent across adult age groups. Carstensen (1993) and Carstensen, Fung, and Charles (2003) argued that, as we age, we put more emphasis on emotion regulation and get better at it (see also Blanchard-Fields, 2007). Older adults believe they are better at regulating their emotions than younger adults (Lawton, 2001). Some studies have found that older adults endorse using positive reappraisal (e.g., “I try to look at the situation in a different light”) more than younger adults (Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007 and John and Gross, 2004), and at least one study found that positive reappraisal reduced subjective distress and physiological arousal in a laboratory paradigm more in older adults (60s) than in middle (40s) or younger (20s) adults (Shiota & Levenson, 2009). Other studies have found that, while younger adults endorse primarily active problem-solving approaches to salient problems, older adults tend to endorse both problem-solving and emotion regulation responses, suggesting they have a wider repertoire of regulation strategies (Blanchard-Fields et al., 1997 and Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007). The emotion regulation processes endorsed by older adults, however, tend to be more “passive” than those endorsed by younger adults, and include avoidance, suppression, or withdrawal (Blanchard-Fields et al., 2004 and Blanchard-Fields et al., 1997). Such strategies may protect older adults from aversive emotional arousal and help them maintain energy and concentration (Consedine, Magai, & Bonanno, 2002). The Aldao et al. (2010) meta-analysis, however, found that these strategies are consistently related to psychopathology (Aldao et al., 2010). Again, the studies in that meta-analysis were done primarily in younger adults, raising the question of whether such relationships would be found in older adults. If older adults are more effective at emotion regulation than younger adults, this would help explain why rates of emotional problems such as depressive symptoms decline with age (Charles et al., 2001 and Fiske et al., 2009). On the other hand, declines in depressive symptoms with age could cause older adults to report fewer maladaptive and more adaptive emotion regulation strategies than younger adults. In other words, age differences in emotion regulation strategies could be attributable to age differences in depressive symptoms. This possibility was examined in this study. In summary, the goals of the present study were to examine gender and age differences in (a) the self-reported use of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, controlling for levels of depressive symptoms, and (b) the relationships of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to depressive symptoms. We examined the two maladaptive strategies that Aldao et al. (2010) found to be strongly related to depressive symptoms: rumination and suppression. We also examined the adaptive strategies included in the Aldao et al. (2010) meta-analysis: problem-solving, positive reappraisal, and acceptance. We additionally examined the use of social support as a strategy, because it is relevant across the life span (Carstensen, 1993) and Tamres et al. (2002) showed a strong gender difference in this strategy in their meta-analysis.

Three general trends were observed in this study. First, across both men and women and all age groups, maladaptive emotion regulation strategies were consistently related to higher levels of depressive symptoms, but adaptive strategies were unrelated to depressive symptoms. This suggests that the findings of the meta-analysis of Aldao et al. (2010) that maladaptive strategies are more robustly related to psychopathology than adaptive strategies hold across genders and the life span. It further suggests that maladaptive emotion regulation strategies may be a good target for interventions and prevention efforts. Second, women reported more frequently using both maladaptive and adaptive strategies compared to men, even when controlling for gender differences in depressive symptoms. This may reflect a more general tendency of women to be more aware of and willing to engage with their emotions than men (Fujita et al., 1991 and Nolen-Hoeksema and Rusting, 1999). Third, reported use of most emotion regulation strategies declined with age, with two exceptions: the use of suppression increased with age for women but not for men and use of acceptance did not decrease with age for women. We cannot know if this was an age effect or an historical cohort effect. Further exploration of the mechanisms by which older adults regulate their emotions, and how regulation strategies change with age, is warranted.