Perceived social support moderates the association betweenemotion regulation and psychological distress: a cross-sectional study among Japanese adults

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have evaluated the adaptiveness of emotion regulation strategies as related to various outcomes; however, most studies have focused on the effects of intrapersonal strategies, independent of interpersonal contextual factors. The present study examined the moderating effects of perceived social support on the association between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and psychological distress. Data were cross-sectional from Internet survey panels. The survey targeted Japanese adults aged 20 to 79 years. The final analysis included data from 1200 participants.

Results of regression analyses showed that higher levels of social support weaken the associations of both adaptive and maladaptive strategies with psychological distress. These results suggest that perceived availability of support may attenuate the negative effects of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, although they may also weaken the positive effects of adaptive strategies. Therefore, psychological interventions should not only target individuals’ emotion regulation strategies but also consider one’s available social resources to promote better mental health.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• social support
• presence of others
• moderation
• psychological distress

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jack Mearns for helpful comments on the draft of the manuscript. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant number 18H05805, 19K20997. The funders played no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, preparation of the manuscript and decision for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article

Notes

1. Because items from the Japanese adaptation of CERQ-short (Sakakibara & Endo, 2016) were not available, we contacted the first author and received items via email. The Japanese translation for three items were slightly modified from the Japanese version CERQ (36 items); however, the content remained the same.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant number [18H05805, 19K20997].