Exploring the Relationship between Decision-Making Styles and Emotion Regulation: A Study of Police Officials in Portuguese Public Security

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Your article on the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and decision-making style in Portuguese police officers is well written and well argued.
All the expected elements are presented. Similarly, the limitations have been properly discussed. The article could therefore be accepted as it stands.
If I really wanted to add something, I'd say that, as you did in the MDMQ description (lines 372 to 376), you could have added sample items to the Retrab description (lines 357 to 365).

 

Author Response

Comments 1: If I really wanted to add something, I'd say that, as you did in the MDMQ description (lines 372 to 376), you could have added sample items to the Retrab description (lines 357 to 365).

Response 1:  Thank you for your suggestion regarding the inclusion of sample items in the ReTrab description. We have revised the text to incorporate this information for clarity. Please see page 8, lines 384 to 413 for the revised content.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript "Exploring the Relationship between Decision-Making Styles and Emotion Regulation: A Study of Police Officials in Portuguese Public Security" is well-written and a valuable contribution.

The authors recruited over 200 high-ranking police officers, who likely got that far in their career because they made good decisions so far.

138 complete datasets were analysed for a relationship between self-rated emotion regulation strategies and self-rated decision-making preferences.

I only have a few minor comments, nothing substantial.

1. in the text it says 84 from Lisboa, in the table it is 75 - that is confusing

2. the authors cite here and there neuroscientific findings in the introduction. This gives the impression the authors conduct an fMRI study. Since the introduction is already very long, I suggest to cut out those neuroscience sections - they are not relevant at all.

3. you mention that for the CFI and SEM you removed items 1 and 4 of the MDMQ. Did you do so also for the correlation analyses? That is, did you use the sum score based on 6 instead of items for the subscale? Please clarify

4. section 2.3 seems that you have performed a face validation, or did you mean content validation? Bit ambiguous.

5. it would help in the result section if you could place the mean scores into a bigger picture, i.e. are police officers worse on maladaptive strategies or on average better? If there is no difference to other professions or university students, what would that tell us about becoming a police officer? There must then be other - not assessed in this study - factors that makes them good officers (hence high-ranking). If on the other hand police officers excel in emotion regulation compared with the average (so far tested) human, please report it.

it would be interesting to follow those police officers and their career. I hope you have a chance to do so.

Author Response

Comments 1: in the text it says 84 from Lisboa, in the table it is 75 - that is confusing

Response 1: Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy between the text and the table regarding the number of participants from Lisbon. We have revised the text and removed the conflicting number to ensure consistency throughout the manuscript. The revised information can be found in page 7, lines 355 to 356.

 

Comments 2: the authors cite here and there neuroscientific findings in the introduction. This gives the impression the authors conduct an fMRI study. Since the introduction is already very long, I suggest to cut out those neuroscience sections - they are not relevant at all.

Response 2: We appreciate your constructive feedback regarding the neuroscientific findings mentioned in the introduction. We agree that these sections may have led to confusion regarding the scope of our study. As a result, we have removed the neuroscience references from the text to streamline the introduction and enhance its relevance.

 

Comments 3: you mention that for the CFI and SEM you removed items 1 and 4 of the MDMQ. Did you do so also for the correlation analyses? That is, did you use the sum score based on 6 instead of items for the subscale? Please clarify

Response 3: Thank you for your insightful question regarding the handling of items for the CFI and SEM analyses. We have clarified the manuscript that we removed items 1 and 4 from MDMQ for the CFI analysis, as stated in the revised text: “These items were part of vigilance and buck-passing dimensions, reducing each from 6 to 5 items. Notably, they were excluded from subsequent analyses.” (please see page 10, lines 446 to 448). Consequently, the correlation analyses were conducted using the sum score based on the remaining 5 items for each of these subscales. We have also added similar information regarding the ReTrab scale (please see page 10, lines 442 to 445). We hope this clarification addresses your concerns.

 

Comments 4: section 2.3 seems that you have performed a face validation, or did you mean content validation? Bit ambiguous.

Response 4: Thank you for your valuable feedback regarding the terminology in section 2.3. To clarify, we intended to convey that we conducted content validation to ensure the items adequately represented the constructs of interest, as established by Nunnally (1967; 1978). We revised text, specifying “content validation” to eliminate any ambiguity. Please see the revised text on page 9, lines 416 to 418.

 

Comments 5: it would help in the result section if you could place the mean scores into a bigger picture, i.e. are police officers worse on maladaptive strategies or on average better? If there is no difference to other professions or university students, what would that tell us about becoming a police officer? There must then be other - not assessed in this study - factors that makes them good officers (hence high-ranking). If on the other hand police officers excel in emotion regulation compared with the average (so far tested) human, please report it. it would be interesting to follow those police officers and their career. I hope you have a chance to do so.

Response 5: Thank you for your thoughtful feedback regarding the contextualization of our results. We appreciate your suggestion to place the mean scores of emotion regulation strategies within a broader context.

In our revised results section, we have highlighted that police officials exhibit a clear preference for adaptive strategies over maladaptive strategies and for functional strategies compared to dysfunctional strategies (please see pages 10-11, lines 451 to 456; pages 12-13, lines 518-533).

We recognize the importance of comparing these results with other professions or university students to provide a more comprehensive understanding how police officers’ emotion regulation skills stack up against those of other groups. As you suggested, future research should indeed explore these comparisons, as well as identify additional factors that contribute to effective policing and high-ranking performance (please see page 15, lines 655-659).

Furthermore, we have acknowledged in the revised discussion that while our findings indicate a tendency towards effective emotion regulation, understanding the development and retention of these skills over time could greatly benefit from longitudinal studies (please see page 15, lines 655-659). Such research would offer valuable insights into how police officers manage their emotions throughout their careers, further informing interventions aimed at enhancing emotion regulation skills within police forces.

Thank you again for your valuable suggestions, which have helped strengthen our manuscript