The Impact Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Graduates’ Job Interview Anxiety

The research of emotion regulation strategies has been a hot topic in psychological research in recent years. Two strategies named cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were frequently researched and most researches demonstrated that cognitive reappraisal was more effective than expressive suppression for emotion regulation. Nearly five years ago, acceptance, a strategy of new idea and new perspective, began to receive more and more attention from emotion regulation field, and researchers have compared it to expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, respectively. However, it is too early to make a conclusion of the comparison now due to few researches and the contradictory results. Job interview anxiety is a kind of negative emotion which most job-seekers would experience, and it has bad impact on performance in an interview. Nevertheless, this situation-related emotion has hardly been explored.In order to discuss and compare the effect of the different emotion regulation strategies on job interview anxiety,82 volunteers were recruited to take part in a mock job interview. The subjects first listened to an emotion-provoking instruction, and then were randomly assigned to one of the four groups (cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, acceptance and control group), the three experimental groups were exposed to corresponding rationales, and the control group had no emotion-regulation rationale. As expected,(1) Mock job interview is an effective and feasible way to provoke job interview anxiety for university graduates;(2) The job interview anxiety behavior scale developed by this research includes two dimensions, non-linguistic behavior and linguistic behavior, and there are nine items in all. Body position, head and body movement, and facial expression are involved in non-linguistic behavior, while completeness, clarity, and fluency are involved in linguistic behavior; .(3)The cognitive reappraisal group and acceptance group reported lower subjective anxiety and showed less anxiety behaviors than control group;(4) Expressive suppression strategy lowered subjective anxiety during the job interview to some extent, but it heightened subjective anxiety after the interview. And its effect on interview anxiety behavior is not significant. Generally speaking, expressive suppression has little impact on job interview anxiety;(5) The acceptance and cognitive reappraisal strategies do not differ in their effect of anxiety regulation, and they are both more effective than expressive suppression for moderating job interview anxiety.