Family emotional environment and emotion regulation: differentiating links to obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and their co-occurrence

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is frequently comorbid with depression (Crino & Andrews, 1996) and the combination of these disorders may result in additional impairment compared to the difficulties of only one of the disorders (Peris et al., 2010). Although there is an abundance of literature examining these groups separately in relation to predictors and associated impairment, little is known about their emotion-related impairments. Research suggests that how emotions are expressed in the family may contribute to emotion regulation difficulties in both OCD and depressed groups (Goodman & Gotlib, 1999; Silk, Shaw, Forbes, Lane, & Kovacs, 2006). Therefore, this studys goal was to examine whether aspects of emotion regulation and the family emotional environment could differentiate college-aged students with OCD, depression, and their comorbidity using a multinomial logistic regression approach.