Abstract
Emotional distress in cancer patients is an important outcome; however, emotional experience does not begin and end with emotion generation. Attempts to regulate emotions may lessen their potentially negative effects on physical and psychological well-being. Researchers have called for the study of emotion regulation (ER) in health psychology and psycho-oncology. Thus, this review has three aims. First, we discuss current understandings of emotion and ER across the cancer trajectory, including the principles of ER and methods for its assessment. Second, we present a model for examining the mediating effects of ER on psychosocial outcomes. Third, we “round out” the discussion with an example: new data on the role of ER in recurrent breast cancer. Taken together, these aims illustrate the impact of affective regulatory processes on cancer patients’ long-term outcomes. As survival rates increase, long-term follow-up studies are needed to characterize the dynamic, reciprocal effects of emotion and ER for cancer survivors. Further research on ER may help women with breast cancer better manage the challenges associated with diagnosis and treatment.
Highlights
The population of cancer survivors continues to grow
Experiments provide for strong causal statements about the immediate and short-term effects of emotion regulation (ER) strategies use, but the particular paradigms used to elicit emotion often suffer from low external validity
Our scant knowledge about the psychological process involved in the emotional adjustment to our scant knowledge about the psychological process involved in the emotional adjustment to recurrent recurrent cancer, a emotion-eliciting event
Summary
The population of cancer survivors continues to grow. In 2012 (the latest year for which information is available), it is estimated that 14.1 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million cancer deaths occurred worldwide [1]. An estimated 32.6 million people were five-year cancer survivors [2,3]. By 2030, the global burden of cancer is expected to increase exponentially due to the growth and aging of the population [4]. Approximately 1,677,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer are diagnosed annually worldwide [1]. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer overall (11.9% of all new cancer diagnoses) but ranks 5th as cause of death (6.4% of all cancer deaths), leading to a rising number of breast cancer survivors worldwide [1]. The emotional needs of survivors shift as they move through diagnosis and treatment, treatment recovery, and into the years thereafter [5,6,7], making understanding patients’ emotional responses across the timeline important
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