The Interpersonal Context of Emotion

Trauma-related distress is associated with disturbances in emotion regulation (Tull, Barrett, McMillan, & Roemer, 2007). The current study investigated associations of emotional reactivity, emotional sensitivity, and risk perception in an interpersonal context with individuals who endorsed varying levels of trauma-related distress. Participants were 64 college-aged women who endorsed a history of sexual trauma. All participants were randomized into conditions in which they either received validating or invalidating responses from an experimenter following their completion of stressful arithmetic tasks. Emotional reactivity was assessed with a self-report measure, emotional sensitivity was assessed through a facial affect recognition task, and risk perception was assessed by the length of time it took for an individual to choose to leave an increasingly threatening situation (in a computerized vignette). No statistically significant relationships emerged between the variables of interest. However, results helped illuminate several important questions for future research. Limitations of the study and future directions for research are discussed