A longitudinal investigation of repressive coping and ageing

Abstract

Objectives: Two studies investigated the possibility that repressive coping is more prevalent in older adults and that this represents a developmental progression rather than a cohort effect. Study 1 examined repressive coping and mental health cross-sectionally in young and old adults. Study 2 examined whether there was a developmental progression of repressive coping prevalence rates in a longitudinal sample of older adults.

Method: Study 1 compared younger adults (mean age 27.6 years) with older adults (mean age 74.2 years) on inventories of mental health and well-being and examined the prevalence of repressive coping in both samples. Study 2 re-tested a sample of older adults previously reported following an interval of 7 years.

Results and conclusion: Study 1 – in line with previous research older adults demonstrated greater psychological well-being and had a higher prevalence of repressive coping than younger adults (at 30% vs. 12% respectively). Study 2 – the data indicated that the prevalence of repressive coping rose from 41% at the first time of testing (2002) to 56.4% at the second testing interval (2009). These results suggest that repressive coping may increase across the lifespan in certain individuals and continue to increase throughout older adulthood. Furthermore, this increase in repressive coping with age appears to result in better well-being in those older adults who become repressive copers.

Keywords:

• ageing
• repressive coping
• psychopathology
• well-being
• thought suppression

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the British Academy grant (SG-49431) to James Erskine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This study was financially supported by the British Academy [grant number SG-49431].

Notes

1. For the purpose of this article we define thought suppression as the conscious and wilful suppression of thoughts one does not wish to have (Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987) whereas repression/repressive coping is defined as the automatic and non-conscious avoidance of negative/threatening information (Myers, 2000).

2. One older adult who reported living in sheltered housing was retained.

3. This sample was previously reported by Leggett, Davies, Hiskey, and Erskine (2011).

4. Furthermore, we also examined a more conservative model where we expected 80% of participants to not change status and 10% to become repressors and 10% to become non-repressors. Importantly, even with these more conservative criteria the goodness-of-fit test was still significant, χ² = 7.02, df = 2, p = .03. In addition, the examination of residuals showed that the percentage of non-repressors was not different from the predicted value but the groups that stayed the same or became repressors were.