Trauma survivors often experience posttraumatic stress (PTS) and report concurrent difficulties with emotion regulation (ER). Although individuals typically use multiple regulatory strategies to manage emotion, no studies yet examine the influence of a constellation of strategies on PTS in a community sample. We assessed six ER strategies and investigated whether specific profiles of ER (i.e. the typical pattern of regulation, determined by how often each strategy is used) were related to PTS.

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... hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that four distinct profiles were present: Adaptive Regulation, Active Regulation, Detached Regulation, and Maladaptive Regulation. Further analyses revealed that an individual's profile was not related to frequency of past trauma, but had the power to differentiate symptom severity for overall PTS and each symptom cluster of posttraumatic NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author's final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page. 2 stress disorder. These findings highlight how profiles characterising multiple regulatory strategies offer a more complete understanding of the ways ER can account for PTS.