Negative affectivity and emotion-focused coping in spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease

Several studies have noted that spouse caregivers’ negative affectivity, or neuroticism, is associated with the use of emotion-focused coping strategies. This association may be artificially inflated, however, due to the common mode of assessment used in these studies or to the reactive relationship between negative affectivity and coping. To address this issue, this study examined the relationship between self-reporting and informant reporting of negative affectivity and self-reported coping. Informants, adult children (N = 39) of caregivers, completed the NEO-Five Factor Index, in which they described their caregiver parent prior to the onset of dementia in their other parent. Caregivers completed measures of current coping and distress. Only emotion-focused coping showed a tendency to be more highly with correlated self-reported than with informant-reported negative affectivity. Correlations between self-reports of negative affectivity and use of emotion-focused coping may reflect a reciprocal interaction between these two variables and therefore may overestimate their association.