The Role of Self-Control on Mood States and Health Anxiety in a Sample of Blind and Visually Impaired People

Abstract

Blind people face daily a stressful condition that they seek to better manage through the control of the surrounding environment. They prefer the maintenance of routines and the contacts with familiar people and frequentation of well-known places. We hypothesize that in people with a serious visual impairment, the exercise of self-control, both as self-regulation both as coping of negative emotions, is significantly associated with the general tone of mood and can act as a protective factor with respect to the concern for their own health. The assumption underlying this study is that the levels of mood and self-rate of health concern are privileged indicators of the quality of life for blind people. 262 blind subjects were administered about personality inventory, scales for measuring resilience, the mood state, the anxiety about their health. Among the key findings, we noted that self-regulation was highly correlated to the mood of males, but only on the condition of acquired blindness, and that it could mediate anxiety levels with respect to their health. Self-esteem was not found to be a protective emotional factor for blind subjects. The study opens up the need to further investigate the capacity of self-regulation on the emotional sphere of people with disabilities in order to create more effective intervention programs to enhance the adaptive capacity of the subject.