Amelia Aldao, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Susanne Schweizer

We examined the relatio nships between six emotion-regulation strategies  (acceptance, avoidance, problem solving, reappraisal, rumination, and  suppression) and symptoms of four psychopatholog ies (anxiety, depression,  eating, and substance-related disorders). We combined 241 effect sizes from 114  studies that examined the relationships between dispositional emotion regulation  and psychopathology. We focused on dispositional emotion regulation in order to  assess patterns of responding to emotion over time. First, we examined the relat  ionship between each regulatory strategy and psychopathology across the four  disorders. We found a large effect size for rumination, medium to large for  avoidance, problem solving, and suppression, and small to medium for reappraisa  l and acceptance. These results are surprising, given the prominence of  reappraisal and acceptance in treatment models, such as cognitive-behavior al  therapy and acceptance- based treatments , respectively. Second, we examined the  relationship between each regulatory strategy and each of the four  psychopatholog y groups. We found that internalizing disorders were more  consistently associated with regulatory strategies than externalizing disorders.  Lastly, many of our analyses showed that wheth er the sample came from a  clinical or normative population signi ficantly moderated the relationships.  This finding underscores the importance of adopting a multi-sample approach to  the study of psychopathology.