BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicHealth and Psychological Adaptations to Life Challenges and Stressful Conditions - Volume IIView all 17 articles
Positive Childhood Experiences and Burnout among Medical Students: The Role of Adaptive Emotion Regulation as A Mediator
Provisionally accepted
- Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, Rochester, United States
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Abstract Burnout is a state of chronic exhaustion caused by excessive stress. Medical trainees are highly vulnerable to burnout, which can negatively affect their well-being. Empirical evidence from Bethell at al. demonstrates that positive childhood experiences reduce adult depression and anxiety, while Gross's process model suggests that adaptive emotion regulation strategies buffer against stress-related outcomes.13, 26 Building upon these frameworks, positive childhood experiences (PCE) and adaptive (positive) emotion regulation (ER) are thought to be protective against burnout, but the mechanisms which mediate these effects are poorly understood. This study aimed to explore whether adaptive ER mediates the relationship between PCE and burnout among medical students. Participants completed well-established and validated measurements of PCEs (Benevolent Childhood Experiences scale), adaptive ER (Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire short version), and burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory). Our results indicate that adaptive ER mediates the relationship between PCEs and burnout, with a moderate indirect effect of PCEs on burnout (β = -0.31, accounting for approximately 67% of the total effect). These findings suggest that targeted intervention programs aiming to strengthen adaptive ER could help protect medical students against burnout. However, limitations include the cross-sectional design precluding casual inference, reliance on self-reported data, and recruitment from a single institution with predominantly female participants, which may limit generalizability to other medical schools.
Keywords: Adaptive emotion regulation, Positive childhood experiences, burnout, Mediation analysis, power analysis
Received: 17 Sep 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lloyd, Izad, Nazmifar, Walkon and Mohiyeddini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Changiz Mohiyeddini
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