(PS10-26) Network Analysis of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms

Abstract Text: Emotion regulation following traumatic events plays a role in one’s risk of developing post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). The bulk of prior clinical research has focused on enhancing how trauma-exposed people regulate their own emotions, which may miss the important ways that people regulate their emotions with the help of other people, or interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). IER strategy use is generally understudied among people with trauma-exposure, leaving little knowledge about how engaging in IER strategies relates to PTSS. Therefore, using a network analysis approach, we explored the relations between the use of four IER strategies (soothing, social modeling, perspective taking, and enhancing positive affect) and PTSS for a large trauma-exposed sample (N = 1293). Overall, we found that the associations between IER and PTSS were generally positive, indicating that more severe PTSS was associated with greater use of IER strategies. We also found that the perspective taking and soothing IER strategies were most bridge central to PTSS. In other words, these strategies were most influential in driving relations to PTSS. Both strategies were more connected to hyperarousal symptoms, and soothing was also connected to negative affect symptoms. These findings provide novel insights into the relations between PTSS and IER strategies in trauma-exposed people. Specifically, people with more hyperarousal symptoms may regulate hyperarousal-related symptoms through the use of soothing and perspective taking, and soothing may be especially helpful for regulating negative affect symptoms. Future research should prioritize establishing the prospective relations between these IER strategies and PTSS in order to determine the direction of the effects, which is a crucial next step. It may be fruitful for clinicians to assess the use and function of these strategies in trauma-exposed people, especially if hyperarousal and negative affect symptoms are more severe.