Structural Relationship of Negative Affect, Dysfunctional Attitudes, Negative Automatic Thoughts, and Depressive Symptoms: Mediating Role of Emotion Dysregulation

Some temperamental vulnerability factors along with cognitive vulnerability variables are essential to understand depression. Recent conceptualizations for depression, have also focused on emotions and their dysregulation, regarding their potential role in the development, exacerbation, or maintenance of emotional disorders. However, theoretical associations between emotion regulation and the cognitive model's constructs have remained unclear. The present study examined the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the relationship between negative affect, dysfunctional attitudes, and negative automatic thoughts with depressive symptoms. The design was descriptive – correlational and data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Population of the current study were some volunteer people who lived in Tehran and Isfahan, in that, 250 of them were selected via convenience sampling following a public announcement. After that, participants responded to Beck depression inventory-II, automatic thoughts questionnaire, cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire, positive and negative affect scale, and dysfunctional attitudes scale. The results of SEM showed that the conceptual model of the research had a good fitness to research data. In addition, all direct and indirect path coefficients were statistically significant. Therefore, the supposed mediating role of emotion dysregulation was approved. According to the results, it can be inferred that emotion dysregulation might be one of the mechanisms through which temperamental and cognitive vulnerability factors lead to depressive symptoms.