Emotion-regulation knowledge predicts perceived stress early but not later in soldiers’ careers

Although emotion-regulation competencies have been found to help people overcome negative experiences, such benefits may depend on the context. In the present study, the authors examined whether knowledge about effective emotion regulation would be associated with lower perceived stress in a population with extremely high job demands. The authors studied 492 German soldiers. Results showed that soldiers with higher emotion-regulation knowledge reported lower levels of perceived stress, which was partly due to a greater tendency to use effective emotion-regulation strategies such as reappraisal instead of suppression. When the authors distinguished career stages, however, the authors found that emotion-regulation knowledge was a significant predictor of perceived stress for soldiers in early but not in later career stages. The authors interpret this finding in terms of the context-dependency of emotion-regulation effectiveness. Especially young soldiers can benefit from higher emotion-regulation knowledge possibly due to the fact that they have fewer job resources overall than their senior colleagues.