Research On Characteristics Of Working Memory Span Of Middle School Students With Different Kinds Of Emotion Regulation Strategies

Emotion regulation strategies and working memory span are two important variables which were chosen from emotion and cognition respectively. Recently, the relationship between emotion regulation and memory has been an important focus in psychological research. The developmental characteristics of emotion regulation strategies for middle school students as well as the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and working memory span were both discussed in this research, which will provide theoretical evidence and practical reference for existed findings.In this study, subjects involved students from grade two in the junior and senior middle school. There were two parts in this research. The first part was ERQ investigation which was used to investigate the developmental characteristics of emotion regulation strategy, examining grade, gender and learning level in the tendency of the use of different emotion regulation strategies. The second part was experimental study inducing different kinds of emotions by watching different videos, and the interrelated relationship between emotion regulation strategies and working memory span was discussed in this part.The results indicated:(1) There was a tendency that middle school students’ emotion regulation strategies developed with the growth of their age, but there was no significant difference in age. And, for all the middle school students, the cognitive reappraisal strategy was used more frequently than the expression suppression strategy. There were no significant differences of grade and gender in the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy, as to learning level, it showed that the students with learning excellence used cognitive reappraisal strategy more frequently than the students with learning disabilities; for the expression suppression strategy, there were no significant differences of grade and learning level, but there was significant difference in gender. And, males used expression suppression strategy more frequently than females.(2) The expression suppression subjects did better than the subjects of the other two groups in the verbal working memory span task; especially for the expression suppression subjects, in spatial working memory span task, they did better in positive emotion than in negative emotion; furthermore, the students’ performance in working memory span task was somehow affected by gender, grade and learning level.