Emotion, Religious Coping, Stigma, and Help-Seeking Attitudes Among Asian Americans: Examination of Moderated Mediation

While there is an abundance of research on the relationship between stigma and help-seeking attitudes among Asian Americans, few studies have examined how emotion and religious variables influence this relationship. Thus, using a moderated mediation model, we investigated how emotion regulation, emotion socialization, and religious coping might affect the relationship between close others’ stigma, self-stigma, and help-seeking among a sample of Asian American students ( N = 105) from a Christian university. We predicted that (a) self-stigma would positively mediate the association between close others’ stigma and help-seeking attitudes, and (b) emotion regulation, emotion socialization, and religious coping would moderate this relationship. Mediation results showed that close others’ stigma was related to self-stigma, which in turn was associated with help-seeking attitudes. Moreover, this mediating relationship was moderated by religious coping ( n = 70) but not emotion socialization or regulation; emotion regulation and help-seeking attitudes, however, were positively correlated. These findings highlight the influence of religious coping and emotion regulation strategies on views of counseling, and we reflect on some implications of these findings.