During medical school, students experience significant amounts of stress. Since certain emotion regulatory strategies are known to be maladaptive, the way in which students are capable to regulate their emotions becomes very important, because it can affect their physical and mental welfare.

The purpose of this study was to assess cognitive emotion regulation strategies in Romanian general medicine (GM) students.

The study was conducted between 2015–2016 on 86 sixth-year Romanian GM undergraduates from the Timisoara “Victor Babes” university of medicine and pharmacy. In order to identify the cognitive emotion regulation strategies (or cognitive coping strategies) that students use after experiencing negative situations or life events we used the Romanian version of the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ).

The sample consisted of 30 (34.9%) males and 56 (65.1%) females, with ages ranging between 24 and 31 years (mean age = 24.97 years, SD = 1.74). Compared to female students, males obtained significantly lower mean scores in “umination” (t = -2.84, P = 0.005, 95% CI = -1.64; -0.29), “positive refocusing” (t = -2.09, P = 0.037, 95% CI = -1.42; -0.04) and “catastrophizing” (t = -3.17, P = 0.002, 95% CI = -1.31; -0.3). Both male and female GM students had significantly higher mean scores in “blaming others” than their respectively gender-related general population.

Results of this study suggest that GM students, when facing stressful or negative events, are more inclined in using “blaming others” as a coping strategy. Female students seem to be more inclined than males to use “rumination”, “catastrophizing” and “positive refocusing” as cognitive coping mechanisms.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.