Emotion regulation and metastatic breast cancer

For many years, researchers and clinicians have speculated that poor emotion regulation or the lack of emotional expression predicts earlier death from cancer. A number of empirical articles have supported this contention, but confusion among researchers about emotion regulation constructs has made it difficult to replicate studies and to target interventions toward specific change in behavior or emotional processing. Recently, a number of researchers have developed more specific self-report instruments, have conducted studies designed to estimate the separability of various aspects of emotion regulation, and have begun to understand the relationship between self-report of emotions and behavioral observation of expression. This increasing clarity will allow more specific tests of associations with physiological functioning and survival. It will also allow greater specificity in targeting interventions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.