The Efficiencies And Mechanisms Of The Undergraduates' Emotion Regulation In Social Rejection Contexts

Undergraduates always confronted the social rejections during interpersonal communication and social interaction.Social rejection is a situation in which individuals are aware of being unacceptable by others or groups in the process of social interaction,leading to disruption of relations and attribution.Social rejection often causes negative emotional experience,which has negative influence on the mental health development of undergraduates.College life was the period between late adolescence and early adulthood,which appeared to be crucial to emotional maturity and psychological growth.It is an indispensable part of the psychological adaptation and social development of undergraduates to learn how to effectively regulate emotion incited by social rejection contexts.Emotion regulation and social rejection were gradually seen as important topics in psychological research,which have acquired valuable achievements.However,research still needed to make a pioneering contribution to the methodology and theories.On the one hand,most of the related research focused on the emotion experience caused by social rejection and ignored that effectiveness and mechanisms of emotion regulation.On the other hand,experimental design and ecological validity of two fields needed to be improved.Consequently,the present dissertation combined different methods including dairy studies,behavioral experiences,event-related potential experiments to exam the mechanisms of the undergraduates' emotion regulation processing in social rejection contexts.The part of demonstrative studies of the present dissertation included three parts.In study 1,dairy studies were used to explore the undergraduates' emotional regulatory strategy usage in social rejection contexts and how it effected emotion experience.Selecting the effective emotional regulatory strategy that undergraduates are accustomed to using in social rejection contexts and examining their frequency of use and their influence on daily emotional experience provided realistic basis for the selection of specific emotional adjustment methods in the follow-up laboratory research.The result indicated that in most of the emotional events relevant to social rejection,undergraduates tended to use attention transfer and cognitive reappraisals,and pay more attention to attention transfer.Results of hierarchical linear regressions revealed that the use of cognitive reappraisal of undergraduates has a timeaccumulated effect on positive emotional experience,and attention to the use of transfer has a hysteresis effect.In the second study,behavioral and ERP experiments were used to investigate the emotion regulation effect of undergraduates in the context of social rejection.Study 2 included two experiments.In experiment 1,the emotional adjustment effect index and the change of emotional experience intensity was used to measure the emotional adjustment effect of college students in the social refusal situation.The experiment found that there was real-time emotional adjustment effect.In experiment 2,the indicators of the difference of brain amplitude between late positive components and the indexes of peak change were used to measure the effect of college students' emotional adjustment in the context of social rejection.It was found that in the early and middle time window,the regulatory effect of attention transfer is superior to that of cognitive reappraisal,and there is no difference in the regulation effect of them in the late time window.In different time windows,the spatial and temporal migration patterns of the peak values of LPP induced by undergraduates' emotion regulation in the social rejection situation basically follow the change from the back of the brain to the forebrain area.In study 3,according to “context-person” interaction framework,there were four experiments designed to explore the mechanisms of the undergraduates' emotional regulatory strategy usage in social rejection contexts.Results showed that: the mechanism of the undergraduates' emotional regulatory strategy usage in social rejection contexts is counter-regulation process with goal orientation.Social rejection contexts elicited preferential processing of positive emotional information which satisfied the coping intense negative emotional experience.Specifically,undergraduates recalled the reality or film and television materials induced the situation of social rejection,were prone to reverse regulation of emotional adjustment bias,and more likely to pay attention to positive emotional information.While in the imagination of social rejection,undergraduates were prone to reverse adjustment difficulties.But when the emotional adjustment target started,it was also easy to produce emotional adjustment effect and counter-regulation mechanism.All in all,the study served as an application-oriented basic research to examine the strategies and effects of habitual emotion regulation of undergraduates in the context of social rejection in daily life.It suggested that habitual selection of an emotional regulation strategy means that individuals often accept the positive immediate effects of this strategy.After further investigation of the mechanism behind the immediate effect,a targeted reverse adjustment mechanism was found.The results of this study can provide scientific basis for undergraduates to effectively regulate the negative emotions caused by social rejection.