Emotional engagement and caring relationships: The assessment of emotion regulation repertoires of nurses

In spite of the importance of emotion regulation for nurses’ well-being, little is known about which strategies nurses habitually use, how these strategies combine in order to regulate their emotional distress, and how these are related to their caregiving orientations. The current study aimed to explore the emotion regulation repertoires that characterize health-care providers and to investigate the association between these repertoires and caregiving orientations in a sample of nurses. Firstly, a confirmatory factor analyses was run to test the suitability of the Regulation of Emotion System Survey for the assessment of six emotion regulation strategies among health-care providers. Subsequently, the latent profiles analysis was employed to explore emotion regulation repertoires. Three repertoires emerged: The Average, the Suppression Propensity and the Engagement Propensity profiles. The participants of the last two groups relied on Expressive Suppression and Engagement, respectively, more often than others. Nurses were more likely to be placed within the Engagement Propensity group when compared to the first responders, and higher levels of hyperactivation of the Caregiving System were associated with this repertoire. A greater reliance on Expressive Engagement among nurses was discussed in terms of the fact that nurses usually have a longer and more care-oriented relationships with patients than first responders.