Passive Aggression and Life Satisfaction in Middle Adulthood: Sequential Mediating Roles of Emotion-Regulation Difficulties and Interpersonal Relationship Quality.

This study examined the relationship between passive aggression and life satisfaction among middle-aged Korean adults, focusing on the sequential mediating roles of emotion-regulation difficulties and interpersonal relationship quality. Participants were 299 adults aged 40-64 years who completed an online survey. The proposed sequential mediation model was tested using PROCESS Macro 4.2 Model 6 with 5000 bootstrap samples. Passive aggression was positively associated with emotion-regulation difficulties and negatively associated with interpersonal relationship quality and life satisfaction. Emotion-regulation difficulties were negatively associated with both the quality of interpersonal relationship and life satisfaction, whereas interpersonal relationship quality was positively associated with life satisfaction. Sequential mediation analysis indicated that passive aggression did not directly predict life satisfaction when the mediators were included in the model. Instead, the indirect effects through emotion-regulation difficulties and interpersonal relationship quality were statistically significant, whereas the remaining direct effect of passive aggression on life satisfaction was not significant. These findings were consistent with a pathway in which passive aggression was associated with greater emotion-regulation difficulties, poorer interpersonal relationship quality, and lower life satisfaction.