Figure 3

Interactive effects of emotion regulation and gender on psychological strain. For adaptive emotion regulation strategies (a), men with higher values experienced a smaller rise in strain until pandemic peak but only if the time gap between first and second assessment was also comparably high (blue line in top right subplot). Acceptance (b) also only had a protective effect on males. Importantly, these gender effects need to be considered with caution due to unequal group size (230 females vs. only 77 males). Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals of between-subject estimates. Boxplots denote 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quartiles with whiskers extending 1.5 inter-quartile ranges or until the most extreme data point has been reached. Data points beyond the whiskers are plotted individually.