Phobia-specific patterns of cognitive emotion regulation strategies

Although fear plays a vital role in survival, an overly active threat detection system could be maladaptive due to its negative health consequences. Putatively maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies are a core problem in phobias. In contrast, adaptive ER strategies could help downregulate the emotion elicited by a threatening stimulus and decrease anxiety. Yet, the number of studies directly examining the pattern of ER strategies linked to various phobias is still scarce. Thus, this study sought to map the patterns of adaptive and maladaptive ER strategies linked to the three most common phobias (social, animal, and blood-injection-injury [BII]). A total of 856 healthy participants filled out our survey including self-reported measures of social anxiety, snake-, spider-, BII phobia, and cognitive ER strategies. Structural equation modeling was used to test the effects between the variables. The results show that social anxiety and animal phobia were linked to both adaptive and maladaptive ER strategies, while BII was only associated with maladaptive ones. Further analyses showed that the most prominent ER strategies differed by subtype. This is in line with previous neuroimaging studies claiming that the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying phobias are also different. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.