Abstract
Rescue workers are exposed to enduring emotional distress, as they are confronted with (potentially) traumatic mission events and chronic work-related stress. Thus, regulating negative emotions seems to be crucial to withstand the work-related strain. This cross-sectional study investigated the influence of six emotion regulation strategies (i.e., rumination, suppression, avoidance, reappraisal, acceptance, and problem solving) on perceived work-related stress and stress-related depressive, post-traumatic, and somatic symptoms in a representative sample of 102 German rescue workers. Multiple regression analyses identified rumination and suppression to be associated with more work-related stress and stress-related symptoms. Acceptance was linked to fewer symptoms and, rather unexpectedly, avoidance was linked to less work-related stress. No effects were observed for reappraisal and problem solving. Our findings confirm the dysfunctional role of rumination and suppression for the mental and physical health of high-risk populations and advance the debate on the context-specific efficacy of emotion regulation strategies.
Highlights
Rescue workers are required to respond to a variety of emergency situations involving human suffering, danger, and death
Acceptance and reappraisal were more frequently used than problem solving, suppression, and avoidance, which in turn were more frequently used than rumination
Our results showed that rescue workers generally use more adaptive than maladaptive emotion regulation strategies
Summary
Rescue workers are required to respond to a variety of emergency situations involving human suffering, danger, and death. Their occupational work includes providing emergency medical assistance to injured people and rescuing humans from accidents, fires, floods, or other natural or human-made disasters. Rescue workers are regularly confronted with traumatic events (e.g., Regehr et al, 2002; Marmar, 2006) That is, they are confronted (directly or witnessing) with actual or threatened death, serious injury, sexual violence, and/or serious aversive details of those events. They are confronted (directly or witnessing) with actual or threatened death, serious injury, sexual violence, and/or serious aversive details of those events These situations go along with physical, psychological, and emotional stress. The more often rescue workers are confronted with traumatic events on duty, the higher is their risk of clinically significant and often comorbid depressive and post-traumatic symptoms as well as physical complaints
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