Facing others’ misfortune: Personal distress mediates the association between maladaptive emotion regulation and social avoidance

Previous research has linked the use of certain emotion regulation strategies to the vicarious experience of personal distress (PD) and empathic concern (EC). However, it has not been tested yet whether (1) vicarious PD is positively associated with maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, (2) vicarious EC is positively associated with adaptive emotion regulation strategies and whether (3) PD and EC mediate the link between emotion regulation and reports of approach/avoidance in response to a person in distress. To that aim, we assessed people’s reports of PD (i.e., anxious, troubled, and upset) and EC (i.e., concerned, sympathetic, and soft-hearted) in response to a video depicting a person in a threatening situation (n = 78). Afterwards, we assessed participants’ reports of avoidance and approach in regards to the character and their disposition to use maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation strategies. Results showed that PD as well as EC were positively related to maladaptive strategies and negatively related to adaptive strategies, and that the association between maladaptive regulation strategies (i.e., rumination) and the willingness to avoid the person in distress was mediated by greater reports of PD. This study thus expands previous evidence on the relationship between maladaptive regulation strategies and affective empathy and provides novel insights about the main role that personal distress played in the association between maladaptive strategies and social avoidance

The role of cognitive emotion regulation on the vicarious emotional response

Perceiving another in need may provoke two possible emotional responses: empathic concern and personal distress. This research aims to test whether different emotion regulation strategies (i.e., reappraisal and rumination) may lead to different vicarious emotional responses (i.e., empathic concern and personal distress). In this sense, we hypothesized that reappraisal may lead to a greater feeling of empathic concern, whereas rumination may lead to a higher feeling of personal distress. To test the hypotheses we used experimental instructions (Study 1) and a priming procedure (Study 2) to manipulate the emotion regulation strategies. The results supported our hypotheses. Furthermore in the rumination condition the emotional experience was described as being more negative and more highly arousing than in the reappraisal condition. We discuss the effect of these two forms of cognitive emotion regulation on empathic concern and personal distress