Emotional regulation among parents of autistic children: a descriptive study in Pakistani population

Background: Emotional Regulation may help to prevent parents of children with disabilities from psychological anguish and to support their child's healthy development. Objective: To identify the variables that influence parents of Autistic children to employ both adaptive and maladaptive ER techniques. Methodology: It was a cross-sectional survey design in nature because the research collected the data from the respondents at a single point of time, the researcher adopted non-probability purposive sampling technique due to being an unknown percentage of Autistic population in Pakistan. The sample size was 57. By adding 20% of drop out the estimated sample size was 70. Parents with at-least 1 autistic child, Age range was 20 years to 50 years, Divorced and Widowed was excluded. Data was collected on a structured questionnaire IIPB protocol. The questionnaire was already pilot tested and had been used in almost 60 countries across the world. Results: Among 70 parents, out of which 35(50%) were Fathers and 35(50%) were Mothers. The Mean Age of participants was 34.5±5.69. Emotional Regulation in parents was found out to be 39.24±16.79. The minimum emotional regulation was 7.00 and maximum score was 66.00. One of the sub-types of Emotional regulation, Reappraisal had a mean score of 23.40±10.35 with minimum score 4.00 and maximum score was 40.00. Suppression was another sub-domain of emotional regulation with mean score of 15.84±7.13 minimum score was 2.00 and maximum score was 27.00. Conclusion: It was concluded that reappraisal and emotional regulation was more frequently employed by both parents.