Understanding Men's Psychological Distress: Contributions of Problem-Solving Appraisal and Masculine Role Conflict.

The relations among masculine role conflict, problem-solving appraisal, and 3 aspects of psy-chological distress (depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with social support) were investigatedusing latent variable modeling in a sample of 260 male college students. The final model indicatedacceptable representation of the data and explained 35% of variance in men’s experience ofpsychological distress. Problem-solving appraisal predicted 34% of men’s psychological distress.However, contrary to published research, masculine role conflict accounted for only 1% of men’sexperience of psychological distress via its indirect relation through problem-solving appraisal.These findings call into question the uniformity myth that greater masculine role conflict isclosely associated with men’s experience of psychological distress. Potentially salient implica-tions of the findings for practice and future research are discussed.