Emotion Regulation In Primary School Children:Strategy Choices And The Role Of Contextual Factors

Emotion regulation refers to the process by which individuals influence the intensity and persistence of emotion through certain mechanisms or strategies.Mechanisms are automatic processes without conscious effort;and emotional regulation strategies are controlled intentional effort to regulate emotion.People's choices of emotion regulation strategies are not constant,they're not only influenced by group and individual factors such as age,gender,inhibitory control capabilities,but also influenced by contextual factors.Therefore,the purposes of this study are : to explore the choices of emotional regulation strategies in primary school children,and to explore whether the specific contextual factors(emotional types,interpersonal types,and emotional intensity)have influences on their emotional regulation choices.This research adopted two methods,and only consider strategies that decrease negative or positive emotion.Study 1 found eight negative emotion regulation strategies and one positive emotion regulation strategy based on the short narrative materials written by primary school children.The relationships between contextual factors(3 emotional types: sad/angry/fear/excite;3 interpersonal types: alone/with friends/with family members)were tested.Study 2 is an experimental study using Sheppes' s Emotion-Regulation-Choice task to examine whether and how intensity of negative stimulus effect primary school children's choice between Cognitive reappraisal and Distraction.Results:1)When regulating negative emotions,primary school children prefer to choose Problem-solving and Venting,followed by Stimulus avoidance,Acceptance and Cognitive Reappraisal;when regulating positive emotion,they prefer to choose Cognitive reappraisal over any other strategies.2)Boys tend to regulate their positive emotion more than girls.3)Primary school children tend to regulate their emotion in fear context more than sad and angry contexts.In addition,fear prompted greater use of Problem solving and less use of Venting than sadness and anger.4)Primary school children are less likely to reduce positive emotions when being with friends than being with family or being alone.And they are most likely to choose Venting when being with family,less likely when being with-friends,least likely when being alone.5)In general,primary school children have no preference when choosing from Cognitive reappraisal and Distraction to regulate negative emotion evoked by pictures.However,in low-intensity negative emotions,they prefer Cognitive reappraisal to Distraction;but in high-intensity negative emotions,there was no difference in the choice of the two strategies.