A study of the predictive impact of emotional regulation profile in perceived stress and work well-being in workers

Abstract

Emotional regulation refers to the processes through which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them and how they experience or express these emotions. The interest in the study of emotion regulation has to do with the importance of the regulation in the emotion management at the workplace interactions and its influence in the well-being of workers and their stress management. Therefore, the aim of this research is to test the predictive power of emotional regulation strategies (down and up-emotional regulation) in stress management and well-being improvement, by studying the correlation of these strategies with perceived stress and work well-being and also by studying the moderator influence of emotional regulation strategies in the relation between stress and well-being in a sample of 358 portuguese workers working in Portugal. The results have shown that down-emotional regulation and up emotional regulation are negatively associated to perceived stress in a significant way. They also showed that up and down emotional regulation are positively associated to work-well being, but not significantly. As to the moderator effect, the results showed no significant moderation for both up and down emotional regulation strategies, however, showing stronger relationship between down emotional regulation and perceived stress, suggesting that people might find this strategy more useful than up emotional regulation.