In contrast, the psychological mediation framework conceptualizes coping/emotion regulation as a mediator of the stress-psychopathology relationship. Specifically, stress is hypothesized to result in maladaptive coping and emotion regulation strategies that in turn confer risk for psychopathology. Studies have indicated that chronic life stressors can lead to emotion regulation deficits (for a review, see Cicchetti & Toth, 2005), including increased sensitivity to anger (Davies & Cummings, 1998), difficulty understanding negative affect (Southam-Gerow & Kendall, 2000), and inappropriate expression of emotions (Camras, Ribordy, Hill, Martino, Spaccarelli, & Stefani, 1988). The relationship between chronic stress and emotion regulation deficits suggests the possibility that stigma-related stressors might also lead to emotion regulation deficits among sexual minorities. How might this occur? Both social exclusion (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Twenge, 2005) and stigma (Inzlicht, McKay, & Aronson, 2006) have been shown to be ego depleting, a process whereby “exerting self-control on one task drains the capacity for self-control and impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring this same resource” (Inzlicht et al., 2006). It has been hypothesized that stigmatized individuals use and deplete self-control in order to
