Distractions And Cognitive Reappraisal, Compare The Role Of Middle School Students' Negative Emotion Regulation

This study was set out to compare the effect of two emotion regulation strategies:distraction and cognitive reappraisal for high school students. The emotion self-report form and physiology recording instrument were used in the study. The participants,45high school students, were assigned to three groups randomly, including distraction group, cognitive reappraisal group, and watching group. The stimulus film was selected from Emotion Film Database of China. Before watching the film, participants were asked to fill the emotion self-report form as their baseline emotion status. And then, participants were shown the film to stimulate their negative emotion. After finishing watching the film, participants would be asked to fill the self-report form as their stimulation phase emotion status. At last, participants would watch the film again and use distraction, cognitive reappraisal, or simply watching to regulate emotion. At the end the experiment, participants would fill the self-report form again as their regulation phase emotion status. Physiological data were collected during the experiment by BIOPAC MP150Systems. Recorded physiological data include SpO2, galvanic skin response, heart rate and finger pulse.The results showed that both distraction and cognitive reappraisal could decrease high school students’negative affect. Distraction only resulted in decreased heart rate; cognitive reappraisal could decrease both the heart rate and the finger pulse. Thus, cognitive reappraisal is a better emotion regulation strategy than distraction for high school students.