The Regulating Effect And Influencing Factors Of College Students' Emotional Adjustment Tendency

Good emotion regulation should both possess social adaptability and psychological adaptability.To find a suitable way of emotion regulation for college students under the current social background,we should first find out the preference of emotion regulatory direction of different individuals,namely the emotion regulatory tendency.Emotion regulatory tendency refers to the preference of emotion‘s adjustment direction,concretely refers to emotion up-regulation tendency or emotion down-regulation.As the cognitive stage occurring before emotion regulation strategy select and execution,nearly no previous research has addressed this topic.There are tratit emotional regulatory tendency and state emotional regulatory tendency.In each emotion regulation process,emotional regulatory tendency forms before emotion regulation strategy selection and implementation.In general,the emotional regulatory tendency formed in real time is consistent with the individuals‘ usual emotional regulatory tendency.However,in special situations,the emotional regulatory tendency formed in real time may not be consistent with ones‘ usual tendency.The formation of emotional regulatory tendency will change according to different situations.Under collectivist culture background,people tend to use expressive suppression strategy to down-regulate emotions.But the influence of multicultural make contemporary college students‘ emotion regulatory tendency very different.The non-consistent expressive suppression strategy use level and emotion regulatory tendency could bring negative influence to the emotion regulation.Therefore,we firstly investigated the influence of emotion regulatory tendency to the outcomes of expressive suppression.Then we further investigated the main influence factor to emotion regulatory tendency.Therefore,this study would conduct the empirical research from the following aspects:1.In the first part of the dissertation,we defined the concept of emotion regulatory tendency and designed the implicit experimental paradigm to measure the emotion regulatory tendency —— ―emotion-expression/suppression‖ association paradigm(Study 1).The results show that the paradigm can measure individual’s emotion regulatory tendency effectively.2.In the second part of the dissertation,we studied the aftereffect of college students’ trait emotion regulatory tendency.(1)In study 2a and study 2b,we examined the influence of emotion regulatory tendency on the outcomes(emotion control effect and happiness)of expressive suppression in 219 participants.As expected,expressive suppression was positively associated with emotion control effect in participants with high emotion control tendency.And expressive suppression was negatively associated with happiness in participants with low emotion control tendency.(2)In study 3,we investigated whether people with different levels of emotion control tendency were equally cognitively effortful and resource-depleting after implementing suppression.Results showed that suppression led to attenuated error detection during a subsequent Stroop task only in low emotion control tendency participants,as indexed by the error-related negativity amplitudes(ERNs).Suppression within high emotion control tendency participants didn‘t weaken subsequent error detection,with ERN amplitude corresponding to a solely watching control group.As to the effect of regulating emotion,suppression in high emotion control tendency is more successful than suppression in low emotion control tendency,reflected in lower arousal and sadness.This suggested that highly valued emotion control made emotion suppression more effective and without impairing subsequent cognitive resources.(3)Study 4 explored the different neural response to ―emotion suppression‖ perception from individuals with different emotion regulatory tendency.Results showed emotion-suppression induced larger N400 in individuals with low emotion control tendency,which mean emotion suppression caused bigger cognitive conflict in individuals with low emotion control tendency.3.In the third part of the dissertation,we studied the antecedent cause of college students’ emotion regulatory tendency.(1)Study 5a and study 5b explored the emotion regulatory tendency under different emotion regulation goals with explicit and implicit measures respectively.Explicit results showed that when the emotion regulation goal was interpersonal harmony,individuals preferred to narrow the emotion control tendency to others and the emotion control tendency to themselves;when the emotion regulation goal was independent self,individuals preferred to reduce the emotion control tendency to others.This behavior met the psychological needs of both achieving independent personality evaluation and interpersonal harmony evaluation.Implicit results showed that when the emotion regulation goal was interpersonal harmony,individuals would decrease the control tendency to social engaging emotions.At the same time,when individuals made efforts to the interpersonal harmony goal in the first task,they would prove their self-independence in the next task;And vice versa.(2)Study 6 explored the different neural response to ―emotion suppression‖ perception from individuals with different emotion regulation goals.Results showed social engaging emotion-suppression induced larger N400 in individuals with social harmony goals,which mean suppress social engaging emotions caused bigger cognitive conflict in individuals with social harmony goals;and social engaging emotion-expression induced larger N400 in individuals with no specific goals.This paper fills in the blank of the research on the emotion regulatory tendency.We find out that emotion regulatory tendency plays an important role in the outcomes of emotion regulation strategy implementation;and emotion regulatory tendency is influenced by emotion regulation target.It provides theoretical and practical basis for college students to find a suitable way of emotion regulation.