The Effect Of Emotion Regulation On Analogical Reasoning In Different Mood State

In recent years, the relationship between the emotion regulation and cognitive activities has become one of the hotspot and key point in emotion psychology research. However, in fact, the effect of emotion regulation on cognitive activity remains controversial. Gross has presented the process model of emotion regulation, which was supported in certain studies, but most of these concentrated on memory activities. There are few studies have investigated the high-level cognitive activities, such as reasoning, decision-making. In addition, previous studies emphasized on the role of emotion regulation under negative emotional state, nevertheless, which does not discuss how the impact of emotion regulation on cognitive activities under the different value and different arousal emotional state. This problem has ignored the role of arousal, which is an important dimension in the emotional process. So this study aimed to explore the relationship between emotion regulation and analogical reasoning in the positive and negative emotional states of different arousal, on this account, our study could make the research in this field more completed, and provide a theoretical basis for which emotion regulation should be chosen in different emotional states. It is important to individual’s social interaction activities and mental health development.This study consists of two parts, in the first part, there are90college students who divided into six groups, have assessed their feeling when they watched the emotional movie clips. In this way, we have got an emotional movie database (EMDB), which could induce the target emotion successfully. This EMDB has laid an important foundation for the later research. The second part include two experiments. There are143participants divided into three groups by questionnaires in experiment1. Different groups using different emotion regulation according to the instructions. After viewing the emotional movie clips, participants should complete the verbal analogical reasoning questions, in order to examine the effect of different emotion regulation on analogical reasoning under the different value of emotional states. In experiment2, there are176college students, the experimental procedure is same as experiment basically, there are merely four emotional movie clips, and participants should finish graphic reasoning and verbal reasoning to probe the relationship between emotion regulation and analogical reasoning under the different value and different arousal of emotional states.The result have shown that, when people in the low arousal of positive emotion, suppression led to lower correct rate of analogical reasoning than reappraisal significantly, and so does in the high arousal of positive emotion. When people in the low arousal of negative emotion, reappraisal’s effect on the correct rate is positive. It’s worth nothing that there is no difference between suppression and reappraisal under the high arousal of negative emotion.This study indicates that reappraisal could keep the positive emotional experience, reduce the negative emotional experience, and have no negative impact on cognitive activities, therefore reappraisal is a better emotion regulation. On the contrary, suppression could reduce positive emotional experience, and heighten the negative emotional experience, and hinder the cognitive activities. However, when individuals in the high arousal of negative emotion, neither suppression nor reappraisal can reduce the negative effect on cognitive activities, that is to say, in the bad mood, the role of emotion regulation is also finite.