The Effects Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Response Inhibition

Emotion regulation has been a research focus in emotional psychology, and the relationship between emotion regulation and cognition has aroused great interest in the field of emotional psychology and cognitive psychology. Response inhibition is the main factor in executive function. The essence of the executive function is to control and regulate cognition. It is the focus of the study of cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. The previous study is mainly on the influence caused by emotion regulation on memory, decision-making, and inference. However, the study of the influence of response inhibition caused by the emotion regulation needs more attention. In the mean time, in the previous study, most researchers commonly hold that cognitive reappraisal is much more better than expression inhibition, but some researchers hold different attitude to it.This thesis, on the basis of experiment, does research on the influence of response inhibition caused by different emotional regulation strategies. This research is conducted on the basis of two related experiments. Experiment one explores the conditions of causing the target emotions; the execution of the emotion regulation strategies; and the subjective influences of different emotion regulation strategies on emotions. Experiment two, which is based on the smooth progression of the first experiment, does research on the influence of response inhibition on the different emotion regulation strategies.The first experiment adopts one-factor three experimental designs. It explores the conditions of stimulating emotion, the execution of emotion regulation strategies and the influence of different emotion regulation strategies on the subjective feelings. The experimental variables are emotion regulation strategies which include control group, cognitive reappraisal and expression inhibition. The experimental variables are achieved by the instruction of emotion regulation strategies. The independent variables refer to subjective feelings and level of enforcement of emotion regulation strategies. The second experiment, which is based on the smooth progression of the first experiment, adopts one factor three complete randomized design. In the context of negative emotion, it aims to explore the influence of response inhibition caused by different emotion regulation strategies. Three groups of participants, under the instructions of different emotion regulation strategies, are required to watch video clips about negative emotions. After watching the clips, they could accomplish the tasks of reaction suppression. The task of response inhibition adopts go/nogo paradigm. The experimental variables are emotion regulation strategies which include control group, cognitive reappraisal and expression inhibition. The independent variables are error rate and reaction index in the go/ nogo task.The research findings are the followings:(1) The target mood with certain intension could be triggered effectively by laboratory emotion trigger technology.(2)The objective of dividing participants effectively could be achieved by the instruction of emotion regulation strategies.(3) The regulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies differ in accordance with subjective negative feelings. The regulation effect of cognitive reappraisal is the best; the effect of expression inhibition is the second best; and the effect of control group is the least best.(4) Different emotion regulation strategies exert different influence on the response inhibition:In the task of response inhibition, the group of expression inhibition performs much better than the group of cognitive reappraisal and control group.The research findings indicates the emotion regulation strategies can not be simply judged as good or bad, since their effects are changing with the task.. It is the characteristics of the task that determines what strategy is suitable.