A Developmental Study Of Emotion And Emotion Regulation In Middle School And High School Adolescents

Emotion is individual’s subjective experience, including multiple reaction models like internal biological, external expression and behavior. This kind of experience could be regulated by different kinds of approach as a result in various reaction tendency. The plasticity of flexibly regulating emotional experience factors is elementary to emotion regulation (Gross & Thompson,2007). The emotion people experience every day and the reaction to emotions have great influence on social relationships and mental health problems. The reason why I focus on adolescents’emotion and emotion regulation, is because it is during adolescence period that people are more sensitive to emotional problems. As a result of the specialty of this period, including developmental changes in body, mental health, social environment, and personal relationship, adolescents are exposed to more social stresses and risks. The development of mental health and adjustment ability is of vital importance to both current and future development. Therefore, adolescence is the key period to shape a better mental individual.The current study targeted on middle school and high school students, aiming to understand the developmental characteristics in emotion and emotion regulation by examining attitudes towards emotion and how students react to emotional events. Based on this, the study investigated the relationship between some common indicators in mental adjustment ability and emotion regulation strategies. In study 1,I used Experience Sampling Method and Subjective Report Method to measure the developmental features of types of emotional events, emotion regulation strategies, and motivation behind it. In study 2,I used questionnaires and a longitudinal design to see the prediction effect of emotion regulation strategies to mental adjustment abilities in adolescents.The study found that:(1) Generally, the emotion reaction in adolescence followed the common emotion regulation characteristics found in adults, that is to say, adolescents tend to use more upward emotion regulations in positive emotional events, and more downward emotion regulations in negative emotional events.(2) Particularly, academic related emotional events played an important role on emotional experience in adolescence. Middle school students, especially high school students, experienced more negative emotional events that were related with academic achievements, and they tend to take relatively more upward emotion regulation strategies in those events. Besides, adolescents considered more about practical goals before they took actions.(3) For different kinds of emotion regulation strategies, the current study found that in positive emotional events, the usage of different emotional regulation strategies could predict adolescents’esteem level, depression level and anxiety level a year later.