Individual Factors

Workbook instruction: Please refer to pages 7 and 8 of the workbook for this sprint.

Individual Characteristics

Individual factors are traits or characteristics of a person. In the context of secondary trauma, we are interested in what it is about the individual which makes them react in certain ways (if at all) to learning about other people’s traumatic experiences. These factors may influence how a professional reacts in the moment, but also how they cope over time. In this programme, we aren’t focusing on static factors, such as age or biological sex, as it is difficult to harness these factors to promote coping in professionals as they are unmodifiable. We are more concerned with malleable characteristics which can be altered. There are dozens of individual factors we could focus on. We have chosen empathy, as this factor is key to helping professional work; and emotion regulation, which is central to any type of coping whether it be in response to secondary trauma or other stressors.

Empathy

Empathy has been conceptualised in various ways, generally argued to be multifaceted containing two components:

1) cognitive empathy, an ability to understand the perspective of another including what they are experiencing and why they might be feeling that way; and 2) affective empathy, the ability to share or feel the emotions of another person. This is a simplified definition of empathy explaining key components. If you’d like to read more on empathy, please check out the article at the end of this sprint.

Empathy is associated with better patient care, better therapeutic relationships and enhanced student learning. Interestingly, in the secondary trauma literature, some forms of empathy are also related to adverse reactions in helping professionals. This presents us with a paradox. We need to be empathic to support our work, but could it potentially lead us into trouble further down the road? Previous research has suggested affective empathy to be a risk factor of conditions associated with secondary trauma including secondary traumatic stress (i.e., PTSD symptoms related to secondary trauma). Cognitive empathy on the other hand has been suggested to be protective, or at least not a risk factor. Realistically, when empathising, we might to some degree feel the feelings of the person we are listening to but also be able to gain a perspective of their experience and therefore experience both kinds of empathy. When we consider empathy as an individual factor in our professional roles, the key is to cultivate it in a healthy and boundaried way. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how factors like empathy influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Instead, it’s about discerning what works best for you, by integrating evidence-based knowledge with your own unique professional experiences.

Emotion Regulation

Now, let’s turn our attention to our second key factor: emotion regulation. We engage in this process constantly whenever we encounter something in our environment that demands our attention. This process isn’t a single event but rather a series of stages, some of which occur before an emotion fully takes hold (antecedent-focused), and others that come after an emotion has begun (response-focused). Just like empathy, emotion regulation has various definitions within academic literature—a common theme you’ll discover! For this program, we’ll be using Gross’ Process Model of Emotion Regulation (Gross, 1998; 2002), which is illustrated in the diagram below.

Gross’s Process Model of Emotion Regulation describes how we manage our emotions. It proposes that regulation can occur at different points in the emotion-generating process, divided into two main types:

1. Antecedent-focused strategies: These happen before an emotion fully develops, aiming to prevent or shape it. Examples include choosing what situations to be in (situation selection), changing a situation (situation modification), directing your attention (attentional deployment), or changing how you think about something (cognitive change/reappraisal).
2. Response-focused strategies: These happen after an emotion has started, aiming to modify its expression or experience. The main example is suppressing emotional displays (response modulation).

Professionals working with clients often face situations they cannot avoid, change, or divert their attention from. In these instances, their primary coping mechanisms typically involve either cognitive reappraisal—gaining a new perspective on the situation—or expressive suppression—containing their immediate emotional responses. For example, a professional might not always have the time to pause and rethink a situation, making emotion suppression their only immediate option for containing their feelings. While this can be a useful short-term strategy, over-reliance on suppression can lead to negative consequences. In contrast, cognitive reappraisal is generally considered a more adaptive and beneficial regulation strategy for long-term well-being. Therefore, professionals need to be given time and space to cognitively process situations which have triggered emotional responses. If you’d like to learn more about emotion regulation in the context of helping professions, take a look at the article by Brillon and colleagues (2025) at the end of this sprint. We will also return to emotion regulation later on in this programme.