Emotional maltreatment and Internalizing Disorders in Adolescent Girls: The Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation

Background and Emotional maltreatment is associated with negative and long-term consequences in adolescence and adulthood including increasing in internalizing disorders. Identify the mechanism of the relationship between emotional maltreatment and internalizing disorders help to identify the variables that these variables can be based of the interventions. Due to the key role of emotion regulation in internalizing and disorders, this study examined the mediating effect of emotion regulation on the relationship between child emotional maltreatment and internalizing disorders in adolescent girls. This study was correlational research and Path analysis was used to assess the mediating effect.The sample of this study consists of 200 high school girl students that were selected by multistage random cluster sampling. participants completed the child abuse scale , Difficulties in emotion regulation scale and Youth self-report scale. Results showed that emotional maltreatment can predict indirectly internalizing disorders in adolescent girls by limited access to emotion regulation strategies (P=0/001). In sum, on the one hand, the results provide further support for prediction of internalizing disorders by child emotional maltreatment and on the other hand, these finding show that the part of available variance in the context of prediction the internalizing and disorders by child emotional maltreatment, accounted for emotion regulation.