Emotion Regulation Moderates the Relationship Between Anxiety Symptoms and Avoidance Behaviors

This project seeks to examine whether trait emotion regulation moderates the relationship between anxiety symptoms and avoidance within subjects over time. Avoidance is one of the main response behaviors among those with anxiety disorders (Barlow, 2002), and the two are highly correlated in a variety of contexts (Berman et al., 2010; Cameran et al., 2012; Choe et al., 2019; Rinck et al., 2009). Avoidance is understood to be influenced by emotion regulation as it is represented in all five families of emotion regulation strategies in James Gross’ process model (Gross, 2015). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) diagnosis criteria and past literature also demonstrate that emotion dysregulation serves as a substantial attribute across anxiety disorders (Jazaieri et al., 2015; Mennin, 2005; Rodebaugh & Heimberg, 2008; Suveg & Zeman, 2010). Over the years, researchers thus have attempted to tease out the relationship between emotion regulation, anxiety symptoms, and avoidance behaviors; however, none, to our knowledge, evaluated emotion regulation as a moderator of anxiety symptoms and avoidance behaviors in intensive longitudinal data. Given such significant gap in the literature, we focus on analyzing emotion regulation as a moderator of anxiety symptoms and avoidance behaviors.