Distress facing increased genetic risk of cancer: The role of social support and emotional suppression.

Objectives: Healthy individuals from hereditary cancer families undergoing genetic testing for cancer susceptibility (GTC) report more distress when they perceive their social support as low and suppress their emotions. This study aimed to explore how suppressing emotions and perceiving others as unsupportive are related with cancer-risk distress.

Methods: We performed a regression-based mediation analysis to assess if expressive suppression mediates or is mediated by perceived social support in the relation with cancer-risk distress. Participants were 125 healthy adults aged over 18 (M = 36.07, SD = 12.86), mostly female (72,4%), who undergone GTC to assess the presence of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer or Lynch syndromes.

Results: Controlling for age and gender, we found a moderate size indirect effect of social support on cancer-risk distress through expressive suppression (β = -0.095) and a direct effect of expressive suppression on cancer-risk distress.

Conclusions: When healthy individuals from hereditary cancer families perceive their social network as less responsive, they tend to not express their emotions, which relates to increased distress facing GTC.

Practice Implications: Practitioners may assess cancer-risk related distress before the GTC and offer distressed individuals interventions focused on changing emotion regulation strategies in a safe group context.