Enhancing well-being at work: The role of emotion regulation skills as personal resources

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Dealing with negative emotions is a crucial work demand, particularly for employees in health care. Job resources (e.g., autonomy, social support, or reward) but also personal resources (such as emotion regulation strategies) might reduce job stress and support well-being. Following this, the present study focused on strengthening emotion regulation as 1 way of dealing with high job demands. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of a standardized emotion regulation training (Affect Regulation Training [ART]; Berking, 2010) to improve emotion regulation skills and well-being of employees in elderly health care. Therefore, 96 elderly care workers filled out an established questionnaire of emotion regulation skills as well as a measure of well-being at pretreatment, posttreatment and at 6-month follow-up. The findings show that the ART fosters emotion regulation skills. In particularly, acceptance, tolerance, and modification of negative emotions was enhanced in the training groups in comparison to a control-group. Modification, meaning the ability to actively change emotions, improved even more over the follow-up-period. Simultaneously, well-being of participants increased over all measurement time points in the ART-group compared with the control-group. Additionally, the improvement in emotion regulation skills from pre to posttreatment was related to well-being at follow-up. In summary, our results support the ART as an effective intervention for dealing with negative emotions and to enhance well-being among employees in elderly care.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)480-493
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of occupational health psychology
Volume21
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2016
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

researchoutputwizard legacy.publication#71878
Scopus 84960423642
PubMed 26974495
ORCID /0000-0002-5632-419X/work/142246590

Keywords

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Emotion regulation, Emotion regulation training, Personal resources, Skills, Well-being