Investigating the role of the difficulty of intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation in the relationship between perceived stress, life events, psychological well-being and personality disorders

Recent empirical and scientific research points out that difficulties in emotional regulation that be described as information, awareness and experiences on emotions is closely associated with many areas of psychopathology. Although this difficulty may seem primarily internal or intrapersonal nature at first sight, some novel aspects such as expression of emotions, their impacts on significant others and their reactions in that sense has been recently emphasized, and thus, this difficulty has been studied in both internal and intrapersonal contexts. Then, its relationships with perceieved stress, life events, personality beliefs and psychological well being are matter of curiosity. Accordingly, the aim of this present study is primarily to adapt and examine psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the Emotion Regulation Difficulty Scale. It is also aimed to investigate relatively mediator roles of both inter and intrapersonal emotion regulation difficulties between percieved stress, personality beliefs and psychological well being. The participants in this study are asked to fulfill instrument tools on difficulties in emotion regulation, personality beliefs, psychological well, perceived stress and life events. In th first phase of the study, data of 300 community adults was analyzed on factor structure, internal consistency, group comparisons and correlations, and it was found that the Turkish DIRE was a reliable and valid measure in a community adult sample. In the second phase of the study in data of 560 adults totally, mediator analyses of both intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation were performed. The results of these analyses generally showed that problems in intrapersonal area was more influential factor for relationship between perceived stress, beliefs of personality disorders and psychological well-being as compared to interpersonal problems. Finally, the findings of this current study is discussed in the lights of current literature on emotion regulation problems comparatively.