Perkins Emily R, Sörman Karolina, McDermott Katherine A, Patrick Christopher J
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA.
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Psychopathol Behav Assess. 2019 Dec;41(4):549-559. doi: 10.1007/s10862-018-9709-z. Epub 2018 Dec 3.
Biologically relevant personality traits of weak inhibitory control (disinhibition) and threat sensitivity confer vulnerability to various clinical problems. Difficulties with emotion regulation have also been studied extensively in relation to risk for and maintenance of psychopathology. However, it remains unclear how emotion regulation strategies interface with dispositional vulnerabilities in affecting clinical symptomatology. The current study provided an initial examination of the roles of disinhibition, threat sensitivity, and use of key emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression) in the occurrence of distress-related symptoms (i.e., depressivity, anxiousness, and borderline personality features). Analyses revealed that trait disinhibition and lowered use of cognitive reappraisal were related to each form of distress symptomatology, with the predictive relationship for disinhibition accounting entirely for that of reappraisal. This finding suggests that deficient top-down control capacity (i.e., disinhibition) is integral to failures in the use of an adaptive but cognitively demanding regulation strategy (i.e., reappraisal). By contrast, threat sensitivity was related both to anxiousness and use of expressive suppression, with the latter two variables unrelated to one another. Anxious individuals may avoid emotionally evocative situations, negating the downstream need to engage in the maladaptive strategy of expressive suppression. Despite certain study limitations (a cross-sectional, self-report design; modest sample size), the current study yielded evidence in line with study hypotheses, indicating a pivotal role for dispositional traits in associations between cognitive-behavioral processes and clinical problems.
弱抑制控制（去抑制）和威胁敏感性等具有生物学相关性的人格特质会使人易患各种临床问题。情绪调节困难也在与精神病理学的风险和维持相关方面得到了广泛研究。然而，情绪调节策略如何与性格易感性相互作用以影响临床症状仍不清楚。本研究初步考察了去抑制、威胁敏感性以及关键情绪调节策略（认知重评、表达抑制）的使用在与痛苦相关症状（即抑郁、焦虑和边缘型人格特征）发生中的作用。分析表明，特质去抑制和认知重评使用的减少与每种痛苦症状形式相关，去抑制的预测关系完全解释了重评的预测关系。这一发现表明，自上而下的控制能力不足（即去抑制）是未能使用适应性但认知要求较高的调节策略（即重评）的一个重要因素。相比之下，威胁敏感性与焦虑和表达抑制的使用均相关，而后两个变量彼此不相关。焦虑的个体可能会避免引发情绪的情境，从而消除了采用表达抑制这种适应不良策略的下游需求。尽管本研究存在一定局限性（横断面、自我报告设计；样本量适中），但目前的研究结果符合研究假设，表明性格特质在认知行为过程与临床问题之间的关联中起关键作用。
