The Use Of Emotion Regulation Strategies And Executive Function

Emotion regulation is an important skill of human self-development and social adaptation.Helping college students to improve their ability of emotion regulation is an important content of their mental health education,and emotion regulation strategy education is an important part of it.In addition to the widely studied and accepted cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression,embodied strategies may be commonly used in people’s lives,but researchers have not paid enough attention to them.In the practice of psychological counseling and intervention,some positive embodied strategies,such as deep breathing and stretching the body,are increasingly recommended as a safer and more convenient treatment.To clarify the embodied emotion regulation strategy,and compare it with other strategies has important theoretical and practical significance.And,to understand the characteristics and psychological needs of each strategy will help us better understand them.From the point of the executive function,one of the most basic cognitive abilities of human beings,this study explored the characteristics of psychological needs of different emotional regulation strategies,so as to provide more accurate emotional health education for college students.This study used three methods:questionnaire survey,behavioral experiment and event-related potentials(ERP)experiment to explore the characteristics of college students’ use of emotion regulation strategies(positive embodied strategy,cognitive reappraisal,and expressive inhibition),and their relationship with the sub-components of executive function(updating,inhibition,shifting).The research included three empirical studies.In the first study,sub-study 1 and 2 used self-compiled "Emotion Regulation Strategy Questionnaire" and other mature scales such as "Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire","Emotional Control Tendency Questionnaire","Big Five Personality Inventory" to understand the characteristics of college students’ daily use of emotion regulation strategies.Sub-study 3 used behavioral experiment to compare the daily use of regulation strategies by students with high or low executive function to explore the impact of executive function on the strategies use.The second study was a behavioral experiment.Sub-study 4 compared the instant emotion regulation effects of the four strategies of breathing,metaphorical embodiment,expressive inhibition and cognitive reappraisal on negative emotions.Sub-study 5 explored the relationship between this effect and executive function.The third study was an ERP experiment.Sub-study 6 compared the differences in the EEG characteristics of the four strategies.Sub-study 7b analyzed the correlation between the typical EEG components of emotion regulation strategies using and the typical components of executive functions to understand the cognitive needs of different strategies.The main research conclusions are as follows:1.The "Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire "compiled by the research had good statistical reliability and validity.The embodied strategy was one of the daily strategies used by college students.The embodied strategies included positive strategies(such as deep breathing,body exercise,body relaxation,positive facial expression control,and positive metaphors,etc.)and negative strategies(such as expressive suppression).Positive embodied strategy was commonly used by college students and was an independent strategy that coexist with cognitive reappraisal and expressive inhibition.Both behavioral and ERP experiments showed that embodied strategies had a good regulation effect on negative emotions.2.The differences in the long-term use of different strategies were that the use of positive embodied strategies was generally related to all dimensions of personality,and all had positive effects;cognitive reappraisal had positive impacts on openness,rigor,agreeableness and extraversion;high-frequency use of expressive suppression might lead to high neuroticism or low extroverted personality.The differences among the strategies were that:deep breathing mainly regulated emotions in unconscious embodied ways.The advantages of embodied metaphor included both unconscious(subliminal effect of metaphor)and conscious components(metaphoric meaning understanding).Cognitive reappraisal was a typical conscious strategy,and its regulation effect was mainly in the conscious stage.Although expressive inhibition was a form of embodied strategy,its automatic attention to emotional information in the unconscious stage had a negative impact on its regulation effect.Positive embodied strategy was a more economical and efficient way to regulate emotions.3.Inhibition ability promoted the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy in daily life of college students,but reduced the use of positive embodied strategy.Inhibition ability impeded the real-time use of deep breathing,embodied metaphor and cognitive reappraisal.Inhibition ability promoted automatic attention to emotional information in the unconscious stage,while inhibited the positive effect of body state on emotional experience in the conscious stage.It prevented embodied metaphor from forming metaphorical meaning in the conscious stage.In the unconscious stage of cognitive reappraisal,inhibition ability reduced the automatic attention to emotional information,while blocking the formation of reappraisal thought in the conscious stage.4.Shifting abiltiy could promote the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy in daily life.The shifting ability promoted the real-time use of metaphor embodiment,cognitive reappraisal and expressive inhibition.In the task of embodiment metaphor,shifting ability reduced early unconscious attention to negative emotional information,and reduced emotional activation.In the cognitive reappraisal,it reduced conscious processing of emotional information.In the task of expressive inhibition,it promoted early unconscious attention to emotional information,while down-regulated the emotional activation with a greater degree.The research’s innovation lied in the introduction of the concept of embodied regulation strategy,verifying the existence of this strategy and proving that it had a good effect on emotion regulation.It found out that executive function had an impact on the use of emotion regulation strategies.It expanded the study of emotion regulation in a more basic direction.These results provided empirical support for the important role of executive function on the mental health of the individuals.These findings would promote the construction of a more comprehensive emotional regulation model,that is,how psychological and physiological factors interacted to promote the use of emotional regulation strategies.The research also provided decision-making evidence for how to implement emotional intervention more effectively in clinical consultation,and provided guidance on how to improve the emotional health of college students,which would enrich the content of mental health education in higher education and psychological counseling intervention methods.Higher educators should fully recognize and emphasize the good regulation effect of positive embodied and cognitive reappraisal strategies on college students’negative emotions,systematically increase the content of emotion regulation strategies in mental health education,and make full use of positive embodied strategy in the intervention of college students’emotional problems.