中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: In the past two decades, studies have shown that personality traits are associated with the use of emotion regulation strategies and depressive affect, and that emotion regulation is significantly related to depressive affect. Potential moderators of these relations, including gender and contextual factors, need further investigation. The present study focused on two important emotion regulation strategies; reappraisal and suppression. We examined the mediating role of emotion regulation in the association between personality traits and depressive affect among both male and female college students in two different contexts, academic and interpersonal problems. Methods: A total of 436 undergraduate students were recruited starting from January to April 2012 for the cross-sectional study. Participants completed a questionnaire package assessing personality traits, emotion regulation, and depressive affect. Structural equation modeling was used for data analyses. Results: The results indicated that males tended to use suppression more often than females to regulate their emotion in academic-related situations. We found no gender differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies in interpersonal situations. However, greater use of reappraisal was correlated with lower depressive scores for males, but not females. For both genders, suppression and depressive affect were, in contrast to our expectation, only weakly related with each other. Reappraisal mediated the effects between personality traits and depressive affect for males regardless of the situation. Conclusions: Discussion of individual differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies should encompass the situational context.