Psychological adjustment to hereditary cancer risk: the role of social support and emotional suppression

Objectives: Healthy applicants to genetic testing for cancer susceptibility (GTC) report more distress when they perceive their social support as low and when they tend to suppress their emotions. This study aimed to explore if suppressing emotions and perceiving others as unsupportive are related to each other in explaining 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 = -.095), in the absence of a direct or total effect of social support in cancer-risk distress. Conclusions: When healthy GTC applicants perceive their social network as less responsive, they tend to not express their emotions, which increases distress facing GTC. Practice implications: To help prevent cancer-risk distress, practitioners should carefully assess if applicants feel they can express their negative emotions within their social support network.