A Study On The Correlation Of High School Students' Emotion Regulation Strategies And Negative Emotions

Emotion regulation strategy is a kind of mental skill which is necessary for everyone to adept social activity. It is involved in a wide range of biological, social, cognitive and behavioral processes. Behavioral emotion regulation strategy is defined as an individual's conscious behavior efforts to achieve the emotion regulation goal in this paper. This study aims at the construction of the structure of high school students'behavioral emotion regulation strategies, and discussing their developmental features systematically. Furthermore, this study tries to explore the relations of high school students'emotion regulation strategies and negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression and anger.In this study, high school students in Jinan , Weifang, Liaocheng were implemented. First, open questionnaires were used to collect the behaviors of high school students when they had bad feelings. Exploratory factor and AMOS confirmatory factor analysis were used to confirm the structure of High School Students'Behavioral Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (BERQ). Then the develop features of high school students'behavioral emotion regulation strategies were reviewed by this questionnaire. Both this questionnaire and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire developed by Garnefski et al were used to explore the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and negative emotions, such as depression, anxiety and anger.Findings are as follows:(1) Four dimensions can be found in the BERQ: distraction, pour & help-seeking, sport, losing temper. Statistical results suggest that the reliability and validity of this questionnaire are acceptable.(2) There are significant gender differences in all four dimensions. Girls report more behaviors in distraction, pour & help-seeking and losing temper, while, boys report more behaviors in sport. (3) There are significant grade differences in three dimensions: pour & help-seeking, sport, losing temper, all of which decrease with grades. And frosh of junior high school has a significant high score.(4) Anxiety, depression and anger all correlate positively with negative emotion regulation strategies and correlate negatively with positive emotion regulation strategies.(5) There are many emotion regulation strategies, which can predict anxiety, depression and anger significantly. The most effective cognitive strategies for prediction the negative emotion are positive reappraisal and catastrophizing. While, the most effective behavioral strategies for prediction the negative emotion are pour & help-seeking and losing temper.