Emotional Regulation as a Predictor of Quality of Life and Social Isolation Among Rescue Employees in Pakistan

Abstract

Rescue workers often have to deal with life-threatening situations and human suffering, which demands a high toll on their emotional control. In this study, the relationship between emotional regulation and two outcome variables (quality of life and social isolation) of rescue employees in Sargodha, Pakistan was investigated. Data were collected from 300 male rescue employees who were selected using purposive sampling method and adopted a cross sectional correlational design. Emotional regulation was assessed using the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2009), quality of life was assessed using the WHOQOL-BREF (Hawthorne, 2008) and social isolation was assessed using the Friendship Scale (Gross & John, 2009). Emotional regulation was a significant positive predictor of QC and all of QC's domains as indicated by Pearson correlation and linear regression. Interestingly, the emotional regulation subscale also had a positive association, not a negative one, with social isolation. Independent-samples t-tests showed that there was significant difference between employees living in extended family systems and nuclear family systems in terms of emotional regulation and quality of life, while there was a significant difference between the marital status of partners on quality of life and social isolation. The amount of change in each of the three variables was not significantly different between the group of people who had a history of a traumatic incident and those who did not. The implications for mental health support in the workplace for rescue personnel are discussed.