The role of emotional regulation in coping with a chronic and uncontrollable life stressor: Navy wives' adjustment to deployment-related stressors

Much recent research has focused on dispositional and situational factors that facilitate individuals' adjustment to significant life stressors. However, minimal attention has been given to the potentially adaptive function of emotions in such circumstances. The central aim of this study was to evaluate whether individuals' abilities to understand and regulate their emotional reactions to an important life stressor would significantly augment the ability of traditional coping skills in predicting psychological and physical adjustment. Individuals' abilities to regulate adaptively their emotions was assessed using a scale designed and tested as part of the study (Regulation of Emotional Distress Scale--REDS). The REDS was administered to 170 wives of enlisted Naval personnel who were currently or had recently dealt with a lengthy marital separation due to their husbands' deployment at sea. Results suggested that the REDS is unidimensional and that it demonstrates adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability with this population. Preliminary convergent and discriminant validity of the scale was established by examining the scale's associations with several conceptually related individual difference measures. Most importantly, results from this study supported the central hypotheses. Individuals' abilities to understand and regulate their emotional reactions to this significant life stressor (i.e., deployment-related marital separations) was associated consistently with better psychological adjustment and physical health. Furthermore, the regulation of emotional distress contributed unique variance to outcome measures of both psychological adaptation and physical health that was not explained by dispositional well-being, negative affectivity, the use of traditional coping skills, or previous physical health. These results provide initial evidence for the potential usefulness of the construct of adaptive emotional regulation and the REDS. The results suggest that the regulation of emotional distress may be of particular utility for individuals faced with largely intractable life stressors. In such circumstances, limited instrumental responses are available. Thus, finding adaptive means to regulate one's episodic emotional distress to the inescapable situation may be at least as important in predicting one's long-term adjustment as is the use of problem-solving strategies.