The relationship of emotional skills and stress: The mediating role of coping strategies

According to Lazarus and Folkman (1984), coping mediates the relationship between resources and stress. The purpose of the current work was to examine whether specific coping strategies (focus on positives, support coping, active coping and evasive coping) mediate the relationship between the resource of emotional skills (i.e., acceptance skills, resilience skills and regulation skills) and stress in Physical Education (PE) teachers. The sample consisted of 457 PE (pre-service) teachers. Emotional regulation skills (SEK; Berking & Znoj, 2008), coping strategies (BriefCOPE; Knoll et al., 2005) and stress (PSQ; Fliege et al., 2005) were assessed by self-rating questionnaires. To analyse data, a bootstrapping analysis for mediation was conducted using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2017) for SPSS. Results show a significant mediation effect of evasive coping strategies within the relationship between resilience skills and stress (95% confidence interval = -.08 to -.01) and within the relationship between regulation skills and stress (95% confidence interval = -. 07 to -.01). Moreover, regulation skills have a direct negative effect (B = -.21, t = -5.92, p < .001) on stress. The model is significant (F(7, 449) = 25.45, p < .001) and explains 28% of variance. This indicates that emotional skills might protect against using negative coping strategies (such as evasive coping strategies) and consequently result in less stress.