Research documents the mental health toll of combat operations on military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, but little research examines civilians who work alongside members of the military. In this research, we argue that a sense of threat is an “ambient stressor” that permeates daily life among civilians who work in these war zones, with mastery likely to both mediate and moderate the mental health effects of this stressor. Using a unique probability sample of Department of Army civilians, we find that threat is positively related to distress, but mastery mediates this relationship nonlinearly, with the indirect relationship between threat and distress strengthening as threat increases. The moderating function of mastery is also nonlinear, with moderate levels of mastery providing maximum stress buffering. This research suggests that contextual conditions of constraint can create nonlinearities in the way that mastery mediates and moderates the effects of ambient stressors.
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