The Influence Of Emotion Intensity And Emotion Type On The Choice Of Individual Emotion Regulation Strategies

Emotion regulation is the way or process by which individuals weaken,enhance or maintain internal emotional experience and external emotional expression.Recently,researchers have found that emotion-regulation strategies are not absolutely adaptive or non-adaptive,and the same strategy will have different results in different situations.More and more researches have been paying attention to the flexibility of emotion regulation and the situational factors that affect the choice of emotion-regulation strategies.Thus,this current research included three studies focusing on the effects of emotional intensity and emotional type on the choice of individual emotion-regulation strategies.Study 1 used the experiment task of emotion-regulation selection proposed by Sheppes,Scheibe,Suri,and Gross(2011)to examine 40 university students' preference for emotion-regulation strategies when facing emotional pictures with different types(i.e.,sadness and fear)and strengths.The students were more likely to use distraction for high-intensity and fear emotions,whereas cognitive reappraisal for low-intensity and sad emotions.Study 2 improved Study 1's emotion-regulation selection task in which participants spontaneously regulate their emotions,and the choice of regulation strategies was not limited.The results found that,46 university students not only adopted cognitive reappraisal and distraction,but also other strategies.The students were more likely to use situation modification for high-intensity and fear emotions,and to use cognitive reappraisal for high-intensity and sad emotions.Study 3 adopted experience sampling method(ESM)to investigate 73 university students' emotional regulation online at five time points every day for a continuous week.The students were asked to report their negative emotions and emotion regulation,the results found that individuals often adopted a variety of emotion-regulation strategies in daily life,including problem-solving,distraction,acceptance,and expressive suppression.However,cognitive reappraisal was less likely to be used with only 19.7% of emotion-regulation.With the increase of emotional intensity,the frequency of using expressive suppression,distraction,acceptance,social sharing,rumination,avoidance,venting increases,the frequency of problem solving strategies decreases,and the frequency of cognitive reappraisal does not occur significantly change.For different types of emotions,students chose different emotion-regulation strategies.For example,more expressive suppression,distraction and avoidance were used for sadness;more problem-solving were used for fear;more expressive suppression,social sharing and venting for angry;more problem-solving strategies were used for anxiety and worry,while less problem-solving strategies were used for loneliness and jealousy.In summary,emotional intensity and emotional type have a significant effect on individual's choice of emotion-regulation strategies.Three studies showed that individuals were not inclined to adopt cognitive reappraisal in high-intensity emotional situations.Study 2 improved the task of emotion regulation selection and found inconsistent results with study 1,which suggested that the experimental task design of predecessors may cause the biased results.There is inconsistency between the results of the experimental method and ESM,indicating that future research needs to value ecological validity and use multiple measurement methods to verify the research findings.