The Effect Of Regulatory Emotional Self-efficacy On Test Anxiety: The Mediating Effect Of Emotion Regulation Strategies

Test anxiety has become harmful on physical and mental health of middle school students. In recent years, researchers have begun to study the impact of emotion regulation on test anxiety. However, there are a few studies to examine the mechanism of emotion regulation on Test Anxiety. The present study intends to explore the impact of regulatory emotional self-efficacy on Test Anxiety from the perspective of emotion regulation strategies.In the first research, participants included 757 secondary school students aged from 15 to 18 years. Measures consisted of the Test Anxiety Scale, the Scale of the Regulatory Emotional Self-efficacy, and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Results indicated that students’ test anxiety was not only negatively related with perceived self-efficacy in managing negative affect(NEG) and perceived self-efficacy in expressing positive affect(POS), but also significantly negatively correlated with reappraisal frequency. Meanwhile, there was also a significant positive correlation between reappraisal frequency and both POS and NEG. Additionally, frequency of expressive suppression was significantly negatively correlated with POS, while NEG and frequency of expressive suppression had a positive relationship. Most importantly, the present study observed that cognitive reappraisal partly mediated the relationship between regulatory emotional self-efficacy and test anxiety.In the second research, we selected 869 high school students as our participants, using the Test Anxiety Scale to measure the students’ test anxiety, using the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire to measure self-blame, acceptance, rumination, positive refocusing, refocus on planning, positive reappraisal, putting into perspective, catastrophizing, other-blame and so on, using the Chinese version of The Scale of Regulatory Emotional Self-efficacy to measure the students’ regulatory emotional self-efficacy. The results showed that, students’ test anxiety was negatively related to refocus on planning, positive reappraisal and NEG, while self-blame, acceptance, rumination, catastrophizing and other-blame was positively related to test anxiety. Test anxiety was positively related to acceptance and putting into perspective. Additionally, POS and NEG were positively related to cognitive reappraisal and refocus on planning, while negatively related to catastrophizing. POS was negatively related to acceptance. Most importantly, the second study demonstrated that rumination, catastrophizing, putting into perspective partly mediated the relationship between NEG and test anxiety. Emotional regulation and emotional regulation efficacy relationship between policies, the study concludes that test anxiety intervention and treatment provided some basis for the conclusions of this study should be applied next intervention studies.