The role of emotion regulation flexibility in the relationship between daily hassles and depressive symptoms

Life stress has been studied for quite some time, and has been defined as traumatic events or the typical stressors that impinge on one's daily life. Since extant literature supports a stronger relationship between depressive symptoms and daily stress, the current study focuses on the frequency and severity of daily hassles. Although this relationship is well documented, the variability in the relationship is not entirely understood. The current study introduces emotion regulation flexibility as a potentially influential factor (i.e., a moderator). The goals of the current study are to 1) replicate the relationships between frequency and severity of daily hassles and depressive symptoms, and to directly compare their effects on depressive symptoms; 2) the explore the new concept of emotion regulation flexibility and its relationship with depressive symptoms; 3) to examine if and how emotion regulation flexibility influences the relationships between frequency and severity of daily hassles and depressive symptoms. Participants were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk system and the final sample consisted of 148 adult, English-speaking individuals currently residing in the United States. Participants completed four questionnaires on Qualtrics.com: a demographic questionnaire, the Daily Hassles Scale -- Revised (DHS-R; Holm & Holroyd, 1992), the emotion regulation flexibility questionnaire (ERFQ; adapted for the current study from Aldao & Dixon-Gordon, 2014), and the Patient Health Questionnaire-Nine (PHQ-9; Spitzer, Kroenke, & Williams, 1999). Emotion regulation flexibility was confined to the Repertoire component (Bonanno & Burton, 2013), and further to Number of Strategies and Categorical Variability. Results indicated that the use of more strategies as well as hassles of greater severity predicted depressive symptoms, but did not support relationships between either frequency of daily hassles or Categorical Variability and depressive symptoms. Results indicated that the relationship between frequency of daily hassles and depressive symptoms was stronger when hassles were more severe. Additionally, results did not support either Number of Strategies or Categorical Variability as moderators of the relationship between either frequency or severity of daily hassles and depressive symptoms. Implications include the importance of examining severity in addition to frequency of daily hassles, and the paradoxical effect of access to more emotion regulation strategies.