Relations among emotion regulation and DSM-5 symptom clusters of PTSD

•Emotion regulation is a risk and maintaining factor for PTSD.•Experiential avoidance demonstrated large effects with all four PTSD symptom clusters.•Variation in PTSD symptoms may have implications for emotion regulation strategies.

Emotion regulation has been implicated as a risk and maintaining factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Three aspects of emotion regulation have demonstrated the strongest relations with PTSD symptoms: experiential avoidance, rumination, and thought suppression. Given that emotion regulation has demonstrated differential relations with DSM-IV PTSD symptom clusters, the current study sought to examine these relations with the DSM-5 symptom clusters of PTSD. Participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (N = 403). All participants endorsed trauma exposure. Measures included the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II), the negative affect scale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-NA; included as a control variable), the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS), and the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI). A path analysis model in Mplus indicated that the AAQ-II demonstrated large effects with all four PTSD symptom clusters. Of those relations, the largest was observed for the AAQ-II and the Negative Alterations in Cognition and Mood cluster of PTSD. Results suggest that individual variation in PTSD symptoms may have implications for the salience of particular emotion regulation strategies.