Emotion Regulation Choice And Effeciency Of Female University Studdents When Facing Negative Stimulus

Emotion regulation is of great significance for maintaining individual physical and mental health,as well as good relationships with others by influence on the occurrence,experience and expression of emotion.Among the existing researches,two most acknowledged emotion regulation strategies were proposed by Gross,namely,cognitive reappraisal(i.e.,regulate emotions by changing the understanding of emotional events and reinterpreting them from different angles)and expression suppression(i.e.,inhibiting upcoming or ongoing emotional expression behaviors).Previous studies on the effects of these two strategies have found that the conclusion on the effect of cognitive reassessment is more consistent,while the conclusion on the effect of expression inhibition is controversial and needs further study.In recent years,emotion regulation strategies choice has choice attracted the attention of researchers.However,there is still very little research on the factors and mechanisms behind these two emotion regulation strategies.Therefore,the research in this paper explores the mentioned problems in two parts.In the first part,we investigate the influence of stimulation intensity and timing to the emotion regulation choice(i.e.,cognitive reappraisal strategy and expression suppression strategy)as well as the efficiency of different strategies for female college students in a Chinese university.Finally,we study the mechanism of influence of stimulus intensity to the emotion regulation choice by using cognitive energy theory(CET).In Study 1,we investigate the emotion regulation strategies(cognitive reappraisal,expression suppression and free-viewing)choice of female undergraduates under different intensity(low,high inetensity)and timing(500ms,1000 ms,2000ms)of negative emotion stimulus,and the efficiency of the three strategies are also investigated.We can find that:(1)Stimulus intensity has a significant main effect on emotion regulation choice.Under low intensity emotional stimulation,cognitive reappraisal and free-viewing are with higher choice ratios by the subjects.While under high intensity emotional stimulation,the ratio of expression suppression is increased,which lead to a higher ratio by the subjects choosing cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression.The main effect of stimulus presentation time is not significant,the interaction of stimulus intensity and stimulus presentation time on emotion regulation preference is not significant.(2)By a repeated measurement of pre-test and post-test when adopting the emotion regulation strategies for the subjects,we can find that the cognitive reappraisal strategy has good effectiveness both under low and high negative emotional stimulus,while expression suppression has good effectiveness only under high negative emotional stimulus.In study 2,by using three independent experiments,we explained the mechanism behind the influence of intensity on the choice of emotion regulation strategies by using the framework of cognitive energy theory(CET,that is the emotion regulation choice is determined).Specifically,experiment 2a explores the single factor of the driving force of the use strategy,and the design is reflected in the subject's willingness to score the use strategy.The results showed that,when adding the intensity of emotional stimulations,the participates shows higher willing both in using cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression,Moreover,the willingness to cognitively reassess is always higher than the willingness to express inhibition.Experiment 2b explores the single factor of the binding force of using strategy,and the design is reflected in the difficulty score of the test strategy.The results showed that,when adding the intensity of emotional stimulations,the participator?s scores on the difficulty of using cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression strategies is both increased.Also,the difficulty of cognitive reassessment and expression suppression is not significant.Finally,in experiment 2c,by adding a mixed design with different stimulus intensity(i.e.,low and high intensity)and three task difficulty(predicting others,predicting oneself,and implementing oneself),we examine the influence of motivation and constraint in adopting strategies on the emotion regulation strategies choices.The effect of directly changing the difficulty of the experimental task on the choice of emotional regulation strategies under the premise that the driving force and the binding force caused by negative emotional stimulation are the same is Investigated.The results showed that:(1)Under high-intensity emotional stimuli,the prediction group(reducing task difficulty)has a higher proportion than the implementation group(high-task difficulty)in selecting two emotional adjustment strategies: cognitive reassessment and expression suppression.(2)Under low-intensity emotional stimulation,The proportion ratio of the implementation group's choice of cognitive reassessment and expression suppression was lower the prediction group.In summary,from the experiment for the investigated group,the emotion regulation strategies choice and the effectiveness of adopting these emotion regulation strategies is affected by the intensity of emotional stimulation significantly.Furthermore,the preference of emotion regulation strategies can be explained by the cognitive energetics theory,that is,the preference of emotion regulation strategies is affected by the motivation and constraint of adopting strategies in common.