The Mediating Role of Anxiety Tolerance and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Concerning Childhood Harms and the Occurrence of Symptoms of Avoidant Personality Disorder in Nurses

This study evaluated the mediating role of anxiety tolerance and cognitive emotion regulation concerning childhood harms and the occurrence of symptoms of avoidant personality disorder in nurses at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. 291 nurses at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences participated in this descriptive correlational cross-sectional study in 2020.They were selected by simple cluster sampling. The instruments used in the present study included the Childhood Injury Questionnaire, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ), the Millon-3 Clinical Multi-Axis Questionnaire (MCMI-III), and the DTS Distress Tolerance Questionnaire. To analyze the statistical data, the Pearson correlation coefficient method was used by SPSS software version 16, and to determine the fit of the studied model, the structural equation model in AMOS-22 software was used to analyze the path of observable variables. The present study’s findings showed that the childhood physical abuse in the final model indirectly affected nurses’ APD through the adaptive/maladaptive styles of cognitive emotion regulation. Thus, with increased childhood physical abuse, the rate of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation styles of nurses decreased and the rate of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation styles increased; as a result, their avoidant personality disorder increased. The present study results showed that nurses who were abused or mistreated during childhood were more likely to display signs of APD in their adulthood.