Year: 2014
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Cancer recurrence is an emotionally intense experience.Further information is needed to understand the strategies that recurrence patients use to regulate their emotional responses.An emotion regulation model was tested using prospective data from patients with recurrent breast cancer (N = 146).Participants completed measures of affect at diagnosis (POMS, CES-D, BHS, LOT-R), measures of emotion regulation 4 months later (COPE), and measures of quality of life (QoL) at 12 months (SF-36).Bootstrapped mediation analyses examined the indirect effect of two emotion regulation strategies, engagement coping and disengagement coping, on the relationship between affect and QoL.Significant mediating effects (p<0.05) were found only for those models including disengagement coping; engagement coping was not a statistically significant mediator.Results indicate that: 1) high levels of positive affect led to less use of all emotion regulation strategies, while high levels of negative affect were not associated with use of any emotion regulation strategy; 2) engagement coping does not appear to be a useful emotion regulation strategy; and 3) disengagement coping predicted higher QoL for patients with negative emotions but lower QoL for patients with positive emotions.Our results highlight the different ways that emotion regulation can function in the context of cancer recurrence.In working with patients with cancer recurrence, it is worthwhile to assess the initial affective experience of each individual in order to provide more focused emotion regulation interventions that may improve patients' QoL.iii To mom and dad, who taught me to always shoot for the moon.
Author: Claire C. Conley
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Topic: Cancer survivorship and care
Subfield: Oncology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2614479901