A Correlational Research On Characteristics Of Middle School Students' Emotional Regulation Strategies And Quality Of Interpersonal Relationship

After careful literature review and investigation of open-ended questionnaires, a proposal of theoretical dimensions of emotion regulation strategy for middle school students was formed, and a questionnaire of emotion regulation strategies specially for middle school students was made in accordance to the proposal. Moreover, an extra questionnaire of interpersonal quality of middle school students was also developed to meet needs of this research. Then the two questionnaires were administered to investigate 1226 middle school students in Mianyang, Neijiang, Luzhou, Dazhou and other cities in Sichuan province. The investigation covered the characteristics of emotional regulation strategies and interpersonal relationship quality of middle school students. A careful statistical analysis was further conducted with the result of the two questionares. The main findings of this research are as follows:(1) The two self-made questionnaires of this study have good reliability and validity. The questionnaire of emotion regulation stretegies for middle school students includes 5 dimensions:seeking help, cognitive shift, depression, attentive shift and emotional expression; the questionnaire of interpersongal quality for middle school students includes 6 dimensions:active and passive parent-child relationships, active and passive peer relationship, and active and passive teacher-student relationships.(2) The middle school students adopted various emotional regulation strategies to regulate their own emotion.There is significant gender difference in the following three dimensions:seeking help, emotional expression and suppression. Girls, as a whole, received more points in seeking help and emotional expression, while boys more points in the depression.(3) There is also significant grade difference in the three dimensions of seeking help, depression and emotional expression. In the dimensions of seeking help and emotonal expression, the junior one students got significantly less points than junior two, senior one and senior two studnets, while the junior one students got significantly less points than the students of the other grades in the depression.(4) The overall quality of interpersonal relationship of middle school students is in middle to upper level. There is significant gender difference in interpersonal relationship quality among middle students, of which girls have better interpersonal relationships than boys do. Besides, there is significant grade differences on the relationship quality of students of which the senior students have better relationship quality than students of the other grades.(5) A significant correlation was showed between the emotional regulation strageties and interpersonal relationship quality among the middle school students. The strategies of seeking help, cognitive shift and attention shift are significantly and positively correlated to positive interpersonal relationships in the moderate level, and moderately and negatively correlated with negative interpersonal relationships. The strategy of depression was significantly and negatively correlated to positive relationships, and has significantly and positively correlated with negative interpersonal relationships.