Emotion regulation peculiarities in relation to stress and burnout

Abstract

Modern organizations demand that employees are able to regulate their emotions, engage emotionally in professional activities, and express, or even induce, certain emotions while fulfilling job-related tasks. More often than not high emotional load in professional activity triggers burn-out symptoms, psychopathological and psychosomatic disorders. This is why both HR-managers and researchers focus on different aspects of emotion regulation. In the present study, we investigated the relations between emotional intelligence, emotion dysregulation, cognitive strategies of emotion regulation, stress symptoms, and burnout in the sample of retail workers (N=89). We showed that increased or chronic stress experiences and burnout symptoms increase emotion dysregulation including destructive coping use and a general decrease in emotional intelligence. Personal factors of emotion dysregulation are the most strongly linked to the scales of chronic stress and emotional exhaustion (the latter from the Maslach Burnout Inventory). We found out that two forms of emotion dysregulation were related to stress and burnout – avoiding emotional experience and mentalizing difficulties. This result is not only theoretically sound, but it also fits well into the clinical phenomenology of stress-induced mental disorders: emotional vulnerability in the structure of personal self-regulation is a grave risk factor for psychopathology in a stressful environment. The connection between such an adaptive emotion regulation strategy as acceptance and measures of chronic stress and burnout can be viewed as a prognostically adverse development. It implies on the one hand that a person recognizes his/her deficits, but on the other hand s/he is fixated on the painful experiences of his/her psychoemotional disadvantage.