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Abstract
This study sought to examine the relationships among emotion regulation difficulties, childhood maltreatment, and risky sexual behavior in a sample of 320 heterosexual men recruited from urban sexually transmitted disease clinics. Overall childhood maltreatment and several specific types of child abuse were significantly associated with emotion dysregulation, number of sexual partners, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) diagnosis. There was evidence of an additive effect of multiple forms of maltreatment on difficulties with emotion regulation and sexual risk taking. Impulse control difficulties and access to emotion regulation strategies, two components of emotion dysregulation, were related to measures of risky sexual behavior. Furthermore, limited access to emotion regulation strategies mediated the relationship between frequency of childhood sexual abuse and a greater number of lifetime sexual partners. This study has important implications for developing effective interventions to reduce the spread of STIs and HIV by expanding affect regulation and distress tolerance strategies among men who have experienced childhood maltreatment.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted as part of Tiffany M. Artime's master's thesis under the supervision of Zoë D. Peterson. This research was supported by a grant from The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R21HD055831) awarded to Zoë D. Peterson. The authors are grateful to the co-investigators on the grant (Julia R. Heiman, Erick Janssen, Jeffry Thigpen, J. Dennis Fortenberry, and Janet N. Arno) and to David Goodrich and Scott Herbert for help with data collection. The authors also thank Tara Galovski and Ethan McCallum for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.