The Pilot Establishment And Application Of Chinese Emotion Regulation Words System

Emotion regulation is an important way for people to keep their mental health,which can be realized by explicit and implicit forms.Implicit emotion regulation has been proved to be effective in regulating individual’s emotional response without consuming additional cognitive resources,and has become an active research field of emotion regulation recently.Sentence unscrambling task and word matching task are two common paradigms of implicit emotion regulation.In these two paradigms,the researchers guide the unconscious goal pursuit of the participants by letting them process the context related to a particular emotion regulation strategy.Therefore,the keywords containing emotional regulation meanings play an important role in implicit emotion regulation researches.However,in the previous researches on implicit emotion regulation,because they focused on experimental manipulation,there are some limitations to the standardization of the keywords related to emotion regulation strategy,such as a small sample size and possible vocabulary confusion.So,there is a lack of a standardized emotion regulation words system for researchers in implicit emotion regulation field.The purpose of this study is to establish a Chinese emotion regulation words system(CERWS)by multi-dimensional ratings and analysis of emotional regulation words,and then verify the effectiveness of the system by experiments.In Study 1,we first identified five commonly used and adaptive emotion regulation strategies based on Gross’ s emotion regulation model.226 emotion regulation words based on reference material were selected for study 1 by group discussion,some of them were emotion regulation words of five commonly used emotion regulation strategies(acceptance strategy,distraction strategy,revealing strategy,suppression strategy and reappraisal strategy)and 50 of them were neutral words.To ensure that words are not confused between strategies,the words that represent only one emotion regulation strategy or do not represent any emotion regulation strategy were selected into CERWS as emotion regulation words or neutral words.That is to say,the selected emotion regulation words are words with a significantly higher degree of relevance to one strategy than those of other strategies,and the selected neutral words are words with low degree of relevance to every strategy.In study 2,120 participants rated the representativeness of words on five emotion regulation strategies.Moreover,the emotion regulation and neutral words were further rated by participants on the dimensions of pleasure,arousal,dominance,tendency,familiarity and spelling complexity.30 participants were randomly selected and retested after one month.In study 3,the effect of emotion regulation words in CERWS was further investigated.The experiment was a 6(implicit regulation strategies: acceptance strategy,distraction strategy,revealing strategy,suppression strategy,reappraisal strategy and no strategy)* 2(pictures: negative pictures and neutral pictures)between-subjects design.The regulatory effect of 5 implicit emotion regulation strategies of CERWS on negative emotion was test using a typical implicit emotion regulation paradigm(sentence unscrambling task).196 participants were involved in study 3,who were divided into six groups(five implicit emotion regulation groups and control group).Before viewing neutral and negative pictures,the participants in implicit emotion regulation groups were required to complete the sentence unscrambling tasks to prim the emotion regulation strategy unconsciously,while the participants in the control group also were required to complete the sentence unscrambling tasks that were unrelated to emotion regulation.Then the participants need to rate their emotion valence and arousal when viewing pictures.The CERWS was well established in study 1.149 emotion regulation words were selected into 6groups(acceptance,distraction,revealing,suppression,reappraisal and neutral)of CERWS.The testretest reliability was more than 0.7 after one month.The Cronbach’s α coefficients?and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance of CERWS were in line with relevant standards.Comparing the attributes of emotion regulation words with those of neutral words,it was found that five emotion regulation strategies had different affective connotation.Acceptance strategy was characterized by high pleasure,high dominance,high tendency and low arousal;distraction strategy was characterized by high arousal,low pleasure,and low tendency;revealing strategy was characterized by high arousal,low pleasure,and low tendency;suppression strategy was characterized by high arousal,low pleasure,low dominance,and low tendency;reappraisal strategy was characterized by high arousal and low tendency.In terms of gender differences,males were more pleased with the words of distraction strategies,while females were more familiar with the words of acceptance strategies.Gender differences as a reference dimension can be considered in future research on implicit emotion regulation using this system.Moreover,results in study 3 showed that implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression strategies decreased the emotional valence and arousal ratings significantly,and implicit distraction strategy decreased the emotional arousal ratings significantly.For implicit acceptance strategy and suppression strategy,study II did not show that it can regulate the subjective negative emotions significantly.The results suggest that different implicit emotion regulation strategies have different effects on different emotions.In the future,researchers who use this system need to choose appropriate emotion regulation strategies according to the research purpose.The limitation of this study is that only subjective reports are used as emotional indicators.Studies have shown that implicit emotion regulation strategies are more effective in regulating participants’ physiological responses.The effect of implicit emotion regulation strategies on physiological responses in this system has not been verified.Among the words of distraction strategy,only one four-character word remains after screening,and the other four-character idioms are deleted because they are not related to distraction strategy or related to other emotional regulation.Therefore,for the four-character word matching task of distraction strategy,the CERWS has not provided enough materials,which needs to be supplemented by subsequent research.However,researchers can still use the sentence unscrambling task to prim the implicit distraction strategy.In conclusion,this study establishes a standardized emotion regulation words system with good reliability,and found gender differences in the representation of emotional information and differences in attributes of multiple emotion regulation words.Moreover,this study verifies the regulatory effect of implicit reappraisal strategy,suppression strategy and distraction strategy on negative emotions,which provides a reference for the future use of the system.