Emotion Regulation Difficulties and Perseverative Thinking among Young and Middle-aged Adults: A Cross-sectional Study in the Indian Context

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21337659

Rehma Khan and Roopali Sharma (Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh)

The increasing prevalence of anxiety and depressive disorders in India underscores the need to investigate transdiagnostic cognitive-emotional mechanisms underlying psychological distress. Emotion regulation difficulties and perseverative thinking are recognized as central processes in the development and maintenance of emotional disorders; however, their interrelationship across developmental stages within the Indian sociocultural context remains insufficiently studied. The present study examined levels of perseverative thinking and emotion regulation difficulties in younger adults (18-25 years; n = 106) and middle-aged adults (26-45 years; n = 106), compared age-related differences, and assessed whether perseverative thinking significantly predicts emotion regulation difficulties. A cross-sectional quantitative design was employed with a convenience sample of 212 adults. Data were collected online using the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ; Ehring et al., 2011) and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale-Short Form (DERS-SF; Kaufman et al., 2016). Results indicated that younger adults reported significantly higher levels of both perseverative thinking (t[210] = 3.577, p < .001) and emotion regulation difficulties (t[210] = 2.199, p = .029) compared to middle-aged adults. Strong positive correlations were found in younger adults (r = .643, p < .001) and middle-aged adults (r = .654, p < .001). Regression analyses revealed that perseverative thinking accounted for 41.4% of the variance in emotion regulation difficulties among younger adults and 42.8% among middle-aged adults. These findings support the conceptualization of perseverative thinking as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability impairing adaptive emotional functioning across adulthood, with implications for age-sensitive and culturally informed interventions.