The Effects Of Emotion, Emotion Regulation Strategy And Attentional Control On Athletes’ Attentional Bias

Attentional bias of athletes is an important research issue of Sport Psychology. Investigating the characteristics of athletes’attentional bias can provide scientific reference and empirical basis for the emotion regulation and psychological selection of athletes. On the basis of the theories of schema and components of selective attention account, the study used methods of questionnaire and experiments to test the effects of emotion, emotion regulation strategy and attentional control on athletes’ attentional bias. The participants of questionnaire survey were 420 college athletes, and the participants of experimental study were 162 college athletes.The study was divided into three parts:partl was to test the effectiveness of the emotion induced materials and the probe detect task, part2 was to revise the athletes’ attentional control scale, part3 was to test the effects of emotion, emotion regulation strategy and attentional control on the attentional bias of athletes toward emotional information.Part1 of the study selected 30 college athletes as subjects, testing the effectiveness of emotion induced materials and emotional materials used in the probe detect task. It was found that both emotion induced materials and the probe detect task were of good effectiveness.Part2 of the study selected 420 college athletes as subjects, testing the reliability and validity of the Chinese revision of attentional control scale and its application among athletes. The results showed that this revision scale was of good reliability and validity and could be used to measure the general attentional control level of athletes.Part3 of the study selected 132 college athletes as subjects, testing different attentional control level of athletes’attentional bias within different emotional state and different emotion regulation strategies. The results showed that:(1) Within positive emotion, athletes showed attentional bias on positive information whiic athletes showed attentional bias on negative information under negative emotion.(2) Within positive emotion, attentional bias of the groups of cognitive reappraisal and express suppression showed on positive information was significantly lower than non-emotion regulation group, while the two strategies did not have significant difference, and the attentional bias of athletes of different attentional control did not have significant difference either; within negative emotion, the attentional bias of the group of cognitive reappraisal showed on negative information was significantly lower than the group of express suppression, the attentional bias of high-attentional control athletes showed on negative information was significantly lower than low-attentional control athletes.(3) Under positive emotion, the high-attentional control athletes showed facilitated detection on positive information, while the low-attentional control athletes showed difficulty disengaging from positive information; under negative emotion, the high-attentional control athletes who used express suppression strategy showed facilitated detection on negative information, while the low-attentional control athletes showed difficulty disengaging from negative information.(4) Within positive emotion, the groups of cognitive reappraisal and express suppression showed lower difficulty disengaging from the positive information than non-emotion regulation group, while the two strategies did not have significant difference; within negative emotion, the group of cognitive reappraisal showed lower facilitated detection of the negative information than the group of express suppression, while high-attentional control athletes showed lower difficulty disengaging from the negative information than low-attentional control athletes.The conclusions were as follows:(1) The Chinese revision of attentional control scale was of good reliability and validity and could be used to measure the attentional control level of athletes.(2) Under different emotions, athletes showed attentional bias on the emotional information which was consistent with their own emotional state.(3) Both cognitive reappraisal and express suppression strategy could regulate the attentional bias of athletes. Under negative emotion, when it came to regulating athletes’facilitated detection on negative information, cognitive reappraisal strategy was superior to express suppression strategy.(4) Within negative emotion, the attentional bias of high-attentional control athletes showed on negative information was significantly lower than low-attentional control athletes. Moreover, the high-attentional control athletes showed greater facilitated detection of the emotional information which was consistent with their own emotional state, while the low-attentional control athletes showed greater difficulty disengaging from the emotional information which was consistent with their own emotional state.