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This study was concerned with the construction and validation of a Financial Distress Index (FDI). A stratified (UK) sample of 2000 adults completed the new measure as well as measures of financial anxiety, general stress and money attitudes. The FDI correlated highly with general stress and financial anxiety, establishing concurrent validity. For the FDI, men scored lower than women, there was an inverse association with age and FDI was lower for the highest income bands. A unit increase in seeing money as security was associated with a reduction in the FDI of 16%, whereas unit increases in money as generosity, freedom, or power and status were associated with an increase in the FDI of, respectively 21%, 24% and 19%. Implications and limitations are discussed.

We describe a psychophysiological study of the emotion regulation of investment bank traders. Building on work on the role of emotions in financial decision-making, we examine the relationship between market conditions, trader experience and emotion regulation whilst trading, as indexed by high frequency heart rate variability (HF HRV). We find a significant inverse relationship between HF HRV and market volatility and a positive relationship between HF HRV and trader experience. We argue that this suggests that emotion regulation may be an important facet of trader expertise and that learning effects demonstrated in financial markets may include improved emotion regulation as an important component of that learning. Our results also suggest the value of investigating the role of effective emotion regulation in a broader range of financial decision-making contexts.\ud \ud Keywords: Emotion Regulation, Financial Decision-Making, Market Volatility, Trading, Heart Rate Variability