The role of emotion regulation on mindfulness and acceptance in chronic pain patients and their impacts on marital functioning and pain adjustment outcomes

Background Although lots of studies investigated on how emotion regulation was related with acceptance and mindfulness separately, there were insufficient evidences in finding how the mechanism of these three variables operated and articulated so as to further link up with pain adjustment outcomes. The present study examined the mediating and moderating role of emotion regulation on mindfulness and acceptance on chronic pain patients and took a further step to investigate how these mediating and moderating effects influenced on patients’ social functioning (i.e. marital functioning) and other pain adjustment outcomes.
Methods A total of 138 patients with chronic pain completed a set of questionnaires regarding mindfulness, pain acceptance, emotion regulation, marital functioning, depression and pain disability. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the moderation and mediation of emotion regulation strategies on the association between acceptance and mindfulness. Hierarchical multiple regression were subsequently performed to test on the whole equation from mindfulness to depression and pain disability.
Results Results demonstrated that emotion regulation, including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, significantly mediated the association of mindfulness and pain acceptance. 25% and 23.1% of the variation came from the mediator of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression respectively. Yet, results failed to verify the influence of early mediating mechanism of emotion regulation on pain adjustment outcomes through marital functioning.
Conclusion The study indicates the mediating role of emotion regulation and also highlights the importance of early mediation process to the subsequent pain adjustment outcomes, but the whole process may be limited to intrapersonal factors instead of linking up to interpersonal factors. All rights reserved.