The Effect Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Implicit Aggression

Emotion regulation has been a hot issue in emotional psychology in recent years, the relationship of emotion and behavioral has been one of the major issues that many researchers concern. A large number of studies at home and abroad have found that emotion regulation is one of the most important factors that have impact on aggression. Since1990s, Shium Andrew Chen and Zhiliang Yang used the methods that used in the implicit social cognition area to test the aggression, and they found that people prefer to the aggressive information unconsciously, that proved the implicit aggression surely existed in people’s minds. After that, the research of implicit aggression is gradually on the rise. But so far, it’s not very clear that the understanding of the relationship between emotion regulation and implicit aggression. With two related experiments, we study the influence of the implicit aggression caused by different emotional regulation strategies.This paper focuses its attention on the research of the relationship between emotion regulation and implicit aggression from a new perspective.In experiment1, to study the influence of positive emotion and negative emotion on the implicit aggression, three film clips were played to elicit positive, negative and neutral emotion before the implicit association test (IAT) of implicit aggression. The second experiment, which is based on the smooth progression of the first experiment, aims to explore the influence of implicit aggression caused by different emotion regulation strategies in the context of different emotions, in this experiment, three groups of participants(cognitive reappraisal, expression suppression and control)were chose by Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Before they could accomplish the IAT, they are required to watch film clips under the instructions of different emotion regulation strategies. The result reveals that:(1)Participants on normal condition showed implicit aggression during IAT, which means people’s implicit social cognition has preference for the aggression-related information.(2) Emotion effectively influence implicit aggression, positive emotion group showed a decline of their implicit aggression, meanwhile, negative emotion group was significantly higher than neutral emotion group in terms of implicit aggression.(3)under positive emotional state, cognitive reappraisal group scored significantly lower than control group, but expression suppression group and control group had no significant difference on implicit aggression; under negative emotional state, cognitive reappraisal group was significantly lower than control group, and expression suppression group was significantly higher than control group.(4)There is no sexual difference in the impacts that different emotion regulation strategies have on the implicit aggression.