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Student Veterans’ Self-Stigma of Seeking Help: Contributions of Painful Self-Conscious Emotions, Traditional Masculine Norms, and War-Zone Service

Despite established connections between traditional masculinity ideologies and self-stigma of seeking psychological help, few studies have examined relevant constructs in samples of veterans. The present study addressed this gap by testing a model specifying conformity to the masculine role norms of self-reliance and emotional control as mediating factors of the probable associations between painful self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt and shame) and self-stigma of seeking help in a sample of student veterans (N = 349) with and without a history of war-zone deployment. After we controlled for gender, posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, and depression, multigroup structural equation modeling revealed that painful self-conscious emotions were associated with conformity to masculine role norms in only the war-zone deployment group. In addition, emotional control and self-reliance mediated the associations between painful self-conscious emotions and self-stigma solely in the war-zone deployment group. Tests of measurement invariance suggested that the moderation effects in the model were not due to measurement differences across deployment groups. Structural invariance testing suggested the observed differences in indirect effects were attributed to the different associations between guilt and shame and emotional control between the deployment groups. Tests of an alternative model, in which guilt and shame were specified separately, indicated that the significant mediation effect of conformity to traditional masculine role norms occurred only when the shared variance between guilt and shame was modeled in a single latent variable. These results suggest that war-zone deployments may solidify military-congruent masculine role norms in ways that exacerbate generalized guilt and shame emotions and promote self-stigma.