• Relationship of Cognitive Emotion Regulation and Meaning in Life With Health Anxiety
  • Fatemeh Lori,1 Pouya Mokari amjad,2 Zahra Fallah yakhdani,3 Seyede Maryam Jahanbin,4 Hossein Boostani zade,5,*
    1. Department of human science, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
    2. Department of human science, Hamedan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran
    3. department of persian medicineShahid sadoughi university of medical sciences,Ardakan,Yazd, Iran
    4. Student Research Committee, Shahed University of Humanities Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    5. Faculty of Paramedicine, Department of medicine, Bushehr University of Medical Science, Bushehr , Iran


  • Introduction: The history of anxiety disorder research exemplifies how an emphasis on empirical research can facilitate theoretical and practical developments. The purpose of this review is to explore how data derived from emotion regulation studies might similarly advance existing anxiety including health anxiety disorder theory. Emotion regulation can be defined as all of the external and internal processes that an individual uses to monitor, evaluate, and modify the nature and course of an emotional response. It is the ability to direct spontaneous reactions and the ability to delay spontaneous reactions in a way that is sufficiently flexible and socially tolerable. Health anxiety is when someone spends so much time worrying about its ill, or about getting ill, when there are no signs of illness or any health problem and it starts to take over their life. Represents a dimensional and multifactorial construct consisting of cognitive, behavioral, affective, and perceptual components. The construct of emotion regulation has been increasingly investigated in the last two decades, and this work has important implications for advancing anxiety disorder theory. Depending on the type of emotion regulation strategy used, movement regulation can reduce or increase fear.
  • Methods: In this systematic review, the data required for this study were collected using keywords and based on reliable databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus and ProQuest. In this study, our statistical population includes all articles registered until 2022. After reviewing the relevant findings and evaluating the quality of the obtained data, 17 articles were analyzed.
  • Results: regulation of emotion and anxiety can be distinguished at the neural, conceptual and behavioral levels of analysis. It is a defensive response against potential sources of anxiety, which includes obvious behavioral, physiological, and cognitive indicators, and is also neurologically located around the amygdala. According to neurobehavioral research, the amygdala may mediate cognitive, behavioral, and physiological indicators of fear. Studies have shown that emotion regulation techniques have an effect on these verbal-cognitive, behavioral and physiological indicators. Cognitive coping processes have long been involved in the expression of feelings and experiences. Recently, a new instrument, the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire was developed to measure nine different cognitive coping strategies people often: self-blame, other blame, rumination, catastrophizing, acceptance, putting into perspective, positive refocus, refocus on planning, and positive reappraisal. Results supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the research. In the research, it was found that there is a difference between the results of the cognitive strategies of emotion regulation. Adaptive strategies have a negative relationship with anxiety symptoms. While maladaptive strategies were found to be positively associated with depressive symptoms. Neuroimaging studies indicate that emotion regulation and fear involve distinct neural regions, and that neural regions mediating fear are negatively correlated with neural regions mediating emotion regulation during reappraisal. Therefore, emotion regulation appears to be a distinct construct that may causally influence anxiety including health anxiety expression. Results of Studies revealed significant and consistent associations between the dimensions of health anxiety and dysfunctional coping and emotion regulation strategies. And the associations between health anxiety and strategies of coping. In other studies there is a significant relationship between positive and negative emotional regulation strategies and health anxiety with the mediating role of emotional ataxia. On the other hand, other significant coefficients were observed between emotion regulation strategy with health anxiety attitude and disaster emotion regulation strategies, rumination with emotional distress
  • Conclusion: The results suggested a significant relationship between cognitive emotion regulation and health anxiety, especially in the subscale of rumination in terms of negative cognitive emotion regulation. Also, Results show that meaning in life has significant negative relationship with health anxiety Also it has been showed that higher presence of meaning in life, as a coping skill, was associated with less health anxiety. Having meaning in life is a useful coping skill that enables people to enjoy good times and endure bad time and Purposeful work. Even when constructs of emotional reactivity, such as depression and generalized anxiety, are controlled for, there is a significant association between difficulties in emotion regulation and anxiety disorder symptoms. Emotion regulation can strengthen the effect that emotional response has on symptoms. Accordingly, these data compliment experimental research demonstrating that emotion regulation techniques can augment or diminish anxiety and related psychopathology.
  • Keywords: health ,anxiety, emotion ,regulation, life