The Emotion Regulation Effects Of Chinese Negative Emotional Word

Emotion is a very important part of everyday life. Faced with different life events, people may have happy, sad, anger, surprise, fear, and other different emotions. In certain situations,it is the same emotion that will produce different influence, both good and bad. So that,maintaining proper emotional state is an important condition for the survival of the individual.That’s why emotion regulation has been studied so long time as a key problem, especially the working model of emotion regulation processes, as well as subjects of different traits when making use of emotion regulation strategies. Both language and emotions are the cognitive activities of human, and they are characterization and nonverbal characterization of human psychology. Researchers gradually pay attention to the emotional regulation effect of language. In fact, negative words were important parts of the language, which were way of thinking for human. The relationship between negation and emotions was also concerned by researchers. Some of them used negative words and sentences to study the processing through affective priming paradigm, and found that the negative words’ emotional regulation effect.Other researchers used startle blink reflex and ERP to study it. Subjects were asked to rate the emotional picture after seeing the negative word clues. And it showed that negative words were effective clues to down-regulate emotion, but there were differences between positive and negative emotion. However, there was little study about emotional regulation of Chinese negative words, as well as different personality traits.This study consisting of two experiments were designed to explore whether Chinese negative words had the effect of emotional regulation. Eysenck Personality Questionnaire(EPQ) were used in Experiment 1 to selected subjects, both introversion and extroversion.Meaningless symbols, negative and positive words were the clues to regulate emotions.Subjects were asked to rate the pictures according to the clues. We recorded their scores,reaction time, and physiological changes during the process. The results showed that whenIV adjusting for positive emotions, participants’ rating score under the meaningless symbol clueswas higher than the negative emotional words. When adjusting negative emotions,participants’ rating score under the meaningless symbol clues was lower than the negative emotional words. The results revealed that the Chinese negative words had emotional regulation effects, effectively down-regulating positive and negative emotions. Based on the meaningless symbol clues, internal and external participants had significantly difference.Extroversion had higher rating score than introversion. Based on the negative emotional words(no happy), there was no significant difference. Based on meaningless symbol clues and negative emotional words(no angry), the two types of participants had no significant difference. This showed that there was difference between two kinds of participates, and it only existed when adjusting positive emotion. When adjusting the positive and negative emotion according to negative words(no happy, no angry), these two types of subjects took longer time than meaningless clues. This result was consistent with previous studies, namely negative processing would consume more resources, resulting in prolonged processing time.Besides, physiological differences did not change significantly during regulating process.The Rumination Response Scale(RRS) were used in experiment 2 to select participates,both meditation and non-meditation. And the experimental procedure was similar to experiment 1. It was found that when adjusting positive emotions under the meaningless symbol clues, these two types of participants had greater scores than negative emotional words. When adjusting negative emotions, meditation had lower scores than negative words,but non-meditation had no significant difference. When adjusting positive emotions, two types of participants took longer time under negative words(no happy) than the meaningless clues. However, there was no difference between meaningless clues and negative words(no anger). The results further illustrated that negative emotional words were effective clues to down-regulate positive and negative emotion, but the effect was different between meditation and non-meditation.In summary, we found that:(1) Chinese negative words had emotion regulation effect,not only can effectively down-regulating negative emotions, but also the positive emotions. In addition, it can reduce individual’s experiencing strength of positive and negative emotions.(2)The emotion regulation effect of Chinese negative words was affected by the emotional type,and there were individual differences. When adjusting positive emotions, the emotion regulation of negative emotional words presented more obvious in extroversion and non-meditators. When adjusting negative emotions, the emotion regulation of negative emotional words presented more obvious in meditators.(3) When subjects adjusted emotionaccording to the Chinese negative words, their heart rate did not change significantly.