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Top1. Introduction
Emotional distress tolerance (DT) is referred to as the perceived ability of an individual to withstand negative emotional states (Zvolensky et al., 2011; Shorey et al., 2017; del Valle et al., 2020). Further, it is the concept of having significance across multiple diagnostic categories (Kiselica et al., 2014; Daros & Williams, 2019). More specifically, low DT has been related to behavior that most immediately mitigates one’s distress that might harm physically or psychologically over the long run (McHugh et al., 2014; Carpenter et al., 2019). Low DT is associated with behaviors such as eating disorders, non-suicidal self-injury, and suicidality (Andover et al.,, 2010; Gandhi et al., 2018). All these signs are critical to research as they lead to physical harm to those engaged in them. The scope of the current study is limited to a sub-set of self-damaging behavior; however, individuals engaged in these self-damaging behaviors might be included in broader diagnostic categories. For example, the one who is engaged in restricting behavior can meet the criteria for “anorexia nervosa”. Interestingly, this prevalence rate is unknown for females, however, less prevalent in males (Andover, et al., 2010; Iskric et al., 2020). Anorexia Nervosa is characterized by a host of serious consequences such as social problems, academic problems, career problems, health problems, and death. Theoretically, distress tolerance could have two shapes i.e. either the perceived capacity or the behavioral act (see Leyro et al., 2010).
It is apparent that self-damaging behavior shows a significant and costly public health concern and similarly poses severe functional outcomes for the individuals engaging in the behaviors. As these self-damaging behaviors are linked with DT, it is an important construct for research in the clinical context. DT is considered to be malleable in response to clinical intervention (Marshall et al., 2008; Veilleux, 2019). DT skill training is incorporated in a variety of “therapeutic approaches” such as “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy”, “Dialectical Behavior Therapy”, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”, and “DT-specific approaches”. Unfortunately, factors contributing to individual differences in the level of DT remained mainly unexplored (Feldman et al., 2014). Individual difference attributes are important to understand and refer to how individuals are different from one another (Greenberg, 2011), these attributes include personality traits, self-concept, physiological responses, sociability, risk-taking, personal interests, values, and attitudes, etc. in the absence of knowledge of these would certainly lead to increasing DT (Marshall et al., 2008; Veilleux, 2019).