The Study On Emotion Regulation Strategies For College Students: Structure, Characteristic And Effectiveness

Emotion regulation strategy is the intentional and planned efforts or actions that the individual takes for the aim of emotion regulation. Based on the comprehensively theoretical and empirical reviews of emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategies, the present research was conducted to investigate the structure, characteristic and effectiveness of college students'emotion regulation strategies.Study1: The structure of college students'emotion regulation strategies was studied. By using in-depth interview and questionnaire methods, the questionnaire was self-designed to investigate the college students'emotion regulation strategies, and then explore the emotion regulation structure of three emotions(anger, sadness and happiness) which the college students usually experience in daily life.Study2: The study of the characteristic of college students'emotion regulation strategies was conducted. The college students'emotion regulation strategies questionnaire was used to investigate the order difference and gender difference of college students' emotion regulation strategies.Study3: The study of the physiological response and effectiveness of college students'emotion regulation strategies were conducted. The experiments were employed to investigate the common emotion regulation strategies i.e. reappraisal and expressive suppression for the anger, sadness and happiness, and the differences of these two strategies under the above three emotions were explored by subjective experiences and physiological responses.According to the results obtained in the above study, the main conclusions can be drawn as follows:1 This self-designed questionnaire had better reliability and validity and it can be used as a reliable test tool for measuring and analyzing college students'angry, sad and happy emotion regulation strategies.2 There is consistency in the structure of negative emotion regulation strategies. Anger and sad emotion regulation strategies have the same multiple factors, which includes six aspects: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, reappraisal, expressive suppression and social support. The structure of happy emotion regulation strategies has four aspects: seeking happy, social support and sharing, reappraisal and expressive suppression, which is different with the structure of negative emotion regulation strategies.3 The order of college students' angry emotion regulation strategies is: situation selection, attention deployment, reappraisal, expressive suppression, situation modification and social support. The order of sad emotion regulation strategies is: attention deployment, situation selection, reappraisal, expressive suppression, social support, and situation modification. The order of happy emotion regulation strategies is: seeking happy, social support and sharing, expressive suppression and reappraisal.4 There are significant gender differences for college students in emotion regulation strategies. Female college students usually use more social support and situation selection strategies than male college students in angry and sad emotion regulation, while male college students use more expressive suppression strategies than the females. Female college students use more seeking happy, social support and sharing than male students in happy emotion regulation.5 There is difference in the subjective experience of the expressive suppression and reappraisal induced by anger, sadness and happiness. Reappraisal can decrease the subjective experience of angry, sad and happy emotion effectively, while expressive suppression can only reduce the subjective experience of happy emotion, but it is effective in increasing sympathetic activation(more decreased in finger pulse amplitude) in angry, sad and happy emotions.