Do positive reappraisals moderate the association between childhood emotional abuse and adult mental health?

Abstract

Background

It is well-established that childhood emotional abuse is associated with poor mental health in adulthood. Yet, less is known about the ways that this association is contingent upon psychological resources.

Aims

The purpose of this study is to examine whether positive reappraisals moderate the association between childhood emotional abuse and adult mental health.

Methods

This study employs regression analyses using nationally representative, cross-sectional data from the 1995–1996 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (N = 3,034).

Results

The analysis shows that childhood emotional abuse is positively associated with negative affect whereas it is negatively associated with positive affect in adulthood. Yet, positive reappraisals reduce the positive association between childhood emotional abuse and negative affect. Similarly, positive reappraisals weaken the negative association between childhood emotional abuse and positive affect.

Conclusions

These observations indicate that positive reappraisals act as a countervailing mechanism that buffers the deleterious association of childhood emotional abuse with adult mental health.

Keywords:

• Mental health
• childhood adversity
• positive reappraisals
• stress process model

Disclosure statement

The author declares that he/she has no conflict of interest.

Research involving Human Participants and/or Animals: This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.

Data availability statement

The current study uses data from the 1995–1996 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. This dataset can be obtained in the following website: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/2760

Code availability

The authors used Stata 13 for analysis and the code is available upon request.