Exploration of Resiliency's Role in Relationship Between Endorsed Life Events and Strategies of Explicit Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation plays a significant role in the ways humans manage and cope with emotional experiences. This study utilizes an exploratory mediation-moderation analysis with cross-sectional, between-subject design to explore how self-reported levels of resiliency shape the relationships between endorsed experience of life events and emotional regulation factors: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, in a university sample (n=445). Participants were given 13 different scales, including the Life Events Checklist (LEC-5), Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), which were used for the present analysis. Results showed that life event endorsement did not prove to have a significant direct effect on resiliency levels, therefore mediation analyses were discontinued. Furthermore, no significant interactions between life event endorsement and resilience levels were revealed for cognitive reappraisal nor expressive suppression, negating a moderation role for resiliency. Follow-up hierarchical regression analyses revealed that both life event endorsement and resilience accounted for significant variance on cognitive reappraisal scores, but neither explained significant variance in expressive suppression. Notably, resiliency accounted for 18% of the variance in cognitive reappraisal. Present results show that resiliency may have a high correlation and direct effect on cognitive reappraisal scores, but does not serve as a mediating or moderating variable. These results suggest that intervention efforts aimed at raising levels of resiliency may help enhance cognitive reappraisal skills regardless of experiencing key life events, thus facilitating in alleviating particular symptoms associated with posttraumatic stress disorders known to be influenced by cognitive reappraisal.Ope