Structural Relationship of Negative Affect, Dysfunctional Attitudes, Negative Automatic Thoughts, and Depressive Symptoms: Mediating Role of Emotion Dysregulation

Some temperamental vulnerability factors along with cognitive vulnerability variables are essential to understand depression. Recent conceptualizations for depression, have also focused on emotions and their dysregulation, regarding their potential role in the development, exacerbation, or maintenance of emotional disorders. However, theoretical associations between emotion regulation and the cognitive model's constructs have remained unclear. The present study examined the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the relationship between negative affect, dysfunctional attitudes, and negative automatic thoughts with depressive symptoms. The design was descriptive – correlational and data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Population of the current study were some volunteer people who lived in Tehran and Isfahan, in that, 250 of them were selected via convenience sampling following a public announcement. After that, participants responded to Beck depression inventory-II, automatic thoughts questionnaire, cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire, positive and negative affect scale, and dysfunctional attitudes scale. The results of SEM showed that the conceptual model of the research had a good fitness to research data. In addition, all direct and indirect path coefficients were statistically significant. Therefore, the supposed mediating role of emotion dysregulation was approved. According to the results, it can be inferred that emotion dysregulation might be one of the mechanisms through which temperamental and cognitive vulnerability factors lead to depressive symptoms.IntroductionPrevious studies indicate that dysfunctional attitudes can lead to depression symptoms both directly (Villalobos et al., 2021) and indirectly, by activating another level of thinking, called negative automatic thoughts (Beck, 2020; Clark and Beck, 2010). Temperamental factors such as behavioral inhibition and negative affect are among the factors that provide the basis for the creation and continuation of emotional problems (anxiety and depression) (Suveg et al., 2010). Nevertheless, a significant percentage of people with high negative affect do not experience high levels of anxiety symptoms, and ultimately clinical anxiety and depression (Tortella-Feliu et al., 2010). Therefore, it is thought that some other factors, including different methods of emotion regulation, may have a mediating role in the relationship between negative affect and the occurrence of mood and anxiety symptoms. Investigating the role of emotion regulation in the relationship between cognitive model constructs and depression severity is important for expanding and increasing the effectiveness of the cognitive theory of depression. It can help to identify the mechanisms involved in the occurrence and maintenance of depression. The present study was conducted to investigate the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the relationship between negative affect, dysfunctional attitudes, and negative automatic thoughts with depressive symptoms. MethodThe research design was a descriptive correlation, which was done in the form of structural equation modeling. Among the Normal people of Isfahan and Tehran who volunteered to participate in the research (N = 314); 250 people were selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria and were assessed by using positive and negative affect Scale (PANAS), dysfunctional attitudes scale (DAS), negative automatic thoughts questionnaire (ATQ-N), cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ) and Beck depression Inventory (BDI-II). Data analysis was done with the structural equation modeling method using Amos23.ResultsThe results showed that the conceptual model of the study has a good fit and the general structure of the tested relationships is confirmed through the obtained data. Moreover, all direct and indirect coefficients of the research model were confirmed. Since no direct effects of negative affect or dysfunctional attitudes towards depression was investigated, the explained variance of depression was entirely the result of the sum of indirect effects exerted through emotion dysregulation. These results, in addition to confirming the fitness of the mediating model, indicate the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the path between negative affect and dysfunctional attitudes towards automatic thoughts and depressive symptoms. The results obtained from the structural equation modeling and testing the research conceptual model can be seen in Figure (1).Figure 1: Structural equation modeling of predicting depression symptoms based on negative affect and dysfunctional attitudes with the mediating role of emotion dysregulation and negative automatic thoughts in the standard estimation mode DiscussionBased on the results of this research, it can be said that emotion dysregulation is a mechanism that can mediate the effect of temperamental and cognitive factors on depressive symptoms. In other words, the effect of negative affect and dysfunctional attitudes in creating and aggravating depression symptoms is applied through emotional dysregulation and negative automatic thoughts. In general, the results of this study have important implications for psychological assessment. One implication is the potential support of trans-diagnostic models. Although a detailed investigation of this issue requires larger studies that cover depression and anxiety disorders simultaneously, it can be said that the results of the present study, along with recent studies conducted by some researchers such as Chaharmahali et al. (2020), can support the trans-diagnostic models of psychopathology in Iranian society. In these models, it is generally assumed that some mediating cognitive and behavioral mechanisms play a role in creating or at least maintaining mental disorders such as depression. Emotion regulation is one of the most important of these processes (Aldao et al., 2010).Due to the nature of cross-sectional studies, it is not possible to prove a definite causal relationship between variables in this study, and the present results only raise possibilities about the pattern of such relationships. In addition, the composition of the participants was not the same in terms of gender, in that women constituted a higher percentage of the sample size. This combination can be consistent with other countries of the world, reflecting the difference in the prevalence of depression in men and women. Thus, maintaining this combination in the research increases its external validity. At the same time, this advantage can also be presented as a limitation, which is the reduction of the internal validity of the study; if this gender difference between the two groups is related to other factors not measured in this work, it might have left an unwanted systematic effect on the results. Another limitation of the current study is that the variable of emotion regulation was measured only through a self-report questionnaire, which may not contain accurate results as participants may use less or more emotion regulation strategies than what actually was reported.