Emotional Reactivity And Emotion Regulation Choice Of College Students With Social Anxiety

There are serious problems of social anxiety in Chinese college students,and social anxiety impacts students' learning and social adaptation in various ways.The emotional distress caused by social anxiety has become one of the most common emotional problems for college students,even not reached the level of social anxiety disorder.Previous studies indicated that emotion hyper-reactivity and dysregulation are core features of social anxiety disorder.In this study,we used college students as subjects,and examined the emotional reactivity and differential use of emotion regulation strategies of individuals with social anxiety,by comparing the differences between individuals with high social anxiety(HSAs)and low social anxiety(LSAs).Study 1 examined the emotional reactivity of individuals with social anxiety.Through questionnaire Investigation we found a significant positive correlation between social anxiety levels and emotional reactivity levels,and there are significant differences in emotional reactivity between HSAs and LSAs.Through the emotional picture rating task designed between subjects,we examined the difference in emotional reactivity differences between the HSAs and LSAs when they faced physical stimuli and social stimuli.The results showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups of participants when viewing physical stimuli;whereas,when viewing social stimuli,HSAs showed higher emotional reactivity.That is,after viewing the stimuli,the HSAs have a more negative emotional experience.Study 2 have two parts,in the first experiment,we used a mixed-design emotional regulation choice task,taking the social anxiety level as the between subjects variable,the type of stimulus as within-subjects variable,we examined the emotion regulation choice and the effect of emotion regulation of college students with social anxiety.There are three main findings in this experiments,(1)there are no difference in emotion regulation choice between HSAs and LSAs,when they facing the physical stimuli.In the face of social stimuli,HSAs significantly choice more avoidance strategy and less reappraisal strategy than LSAs.(2)There is no difference in the effect of emotion regulation between HSAs and LSAs after their regulations.(3)The effect of reappraisal is better than avoidance,compared with avoidance,subjects experienced significantly more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions after using reappraisal.In the second parts,questionnaire and experiment were conducted to explore the influencing factors that cause the difference in the emotion regulation choice between HSAs and LSAs.It was found that the emotion regulation choice is not influenced by the emotional reactivity,and although there was significant difference in regulatory emotional self-efficacy between HSAs and LSAs,but it seems that there was no relations between regulatory emotional self-efficacy and emotion regulation choice.Based on the results of study 1 and study 2,college students with social anxiety have problems with high emotional reactivity,abnormal emotional regulation choices,and low regulatory emotional self-efficacy,and their emotional problems are more often encountered in the face of social stimuli.There is no difference in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation choice between HSAs and LSAs,in the face of physical stimuli.In addition,the findings in the study indicate that the emotion regulation problems of college students with social anxiety may be due to excessive choice of avoidance and other non-adaptive strategies.Their ability of use specific emotion regulation strategies does not seem to be different from normal college students.