The Mediating Role of Cognitive Emotion Regulation and Cognitive Distortion Strategies in Relation to Attachment Styles and Dissociative Experiences

In dissociative experience, the coherent and perfectly coordinated quality of human cognition becomes highly incoherent. This study aims at investigating the mediating role of cognitive emotion regulation and cognitive distortion strategies between attachment styles and dissociative experiences among students.

This study was descriptive and used a correlation design. The statistical population consisted of all students of Islamic Azad University of Marvdasht. Using convenience sampling, 329 students (187 girls and 142 boys) were selected as the sample of the study. For accomplishing the research, the dissociative experiences (Bernstein and Putnam, 1986), attachment styles (Bartolomio and Horowit, 1991), cognitive distortion (Hammachi and Ozturk, 2004), and emotion regulation (Garnefski, Kraaij, Spinhoven, 2001) questionnaires, were used.

The results showed that the direct effect of safe style, isolation avoidance, and fearful style on dissociative experiences was equal to -0.15, 0.17, 0.21 which was significant (P < 0.01). The direct effect of preoccupied style was not significant. The indirect effect of safe and fearful style on dissociative experiences were equal to -0.12 and 0.33 which was significant (P < 0.01 and P < 0.05, respectively). The indirect effect of avoidance/detachment style and preoccupation style was not significant. The fitness of the model was 0.02, which was at the desired level.  

Considering the negative effect of secure style and the positive effect of insecure style on dissociative experiences, the importance of secure style and insecure style should be given more attention in treatment.