Anti-hedonic Emotional Regulatory Strategies And Motivations To Cope With Negative Events Among Adolescents

Chinese traditional culture values and appreciates the spirit of enduring hardship during the rough time, so anti-hedonic emotional regulation has special adaptive significance in Chinese cultural background. Study 1 aimed to explore the pattern of negative emotional regulation in Chinese adolescents and to study different regulatory strategies and motivations used to cope with different types of negative events among Chinese adolescents. In study 1, experience sampling method was adopted to collect the daily information about negative emotion regulation among Chinese high school students. Study 1 indicated that:(1) in the daily emotional lives of Chinese adolescents, most of the negative emotional events were relevant to academic activities because comparing with interpersonalactivities and daily-life activities, academic career had greater importance to Chinese adolescents. (2) different regulatory strategies were used to cope with different types of negative events among Chinese adolescents. Chinese adolescents tended to used up-regulation to cope with negative academic emotional events. While they tended to used down-regulation to cope with negative interpersonal emotional events and no-regulation to cope with negative daily-life emotional events. (3) anti-hedonic strategies were more likely to be found in negative academic emotional events. Anti-hedonic motivations, which were also named utilitarian motivations, were more likely to appear in negative academic emotional events. Study 2 further examined the causal relationship between anti-hedonic strategyand anti-hedonic motivation, and explore the mechanism of anti-hedonic emotional regulation.Study 2 used experiment method to observe the using of anti-hedonic strategy after the priming of anti-hedonic motivation among Chinese adolescents. Study 2revealed that when facing negative academic emotional events, after the priming of anti-hedonic motivation, the experimental group expressed the same preference for positive movies as control group and more preference for negative movies compared with control group. The results indicated that while facing negative academic emotional events, after the priming of anti-hedonic motivation, Chinese adolescents would tend to choose negative movies to bring them negative emotion, which reflected their anti-hedonic strategy. That meant anti-hedonic motivation would increase the preference for anti-hedonic strategy.