Emotional Regulation and Marital Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Anger Rumination

The purpose of this research was examining the effect of emotional regulation on marital satisfaction through anger rumination among married women in city of Lar. The sample included 306 married women who were selected randomly from women referring to Lar city counselling center. The instruments used in this study were the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Scale (Granefske & Kraaij, 2002), Anger Rumination Scale (Suchodolsky, & et al., 2001), and Enrich's Marital Satisfaction Scale (Olson, 2006). To assess the validity and reliability of these tools, internal consistency and Cronbach's alpha coefficient were used. The proposed model was evaluated using structural equation model (AMOS-21 software). Results.showed adaptive and maladaptive strategies of cognitive emotion regulation haven’t direct effect on marital satisfaction. Adaptive strategies negatively and maladaptive strategies positively predicted anger rumination. Memories of anger and Revenge Thoughts (from anger rumination components) showed negative effect on marital satisfaction. Results of   Bootstrap test indicated that adaptive strategies result to increase marital satisfaction through decrease memories of anger and revenge Thoughts. Also, maladaptive strategies result to decrease marital satisfaction through increase memories of anger and revenge Thoughts. In sum, results of this research show the mediating role of anger rumination in the relationship between emotional regulation and marital satisfaction among married women.