Daily Emotional Characteristics In Individuals With Different Resilience Levels

To investigate the cognitive and emotional characteristic of resilient individuals has significant implication for understanding the mechanism and process of resilience. As a new perspective on emotion functioning, emotional complexity has important implication for physical and psychological health. However, it failed to attract the attention of domestic academe.The present study firstly selected 252 participants from 6 universities in Shanghai, after completing CCSPSS, ICS, CD-RISC and CARS, we conducted the screening and grouping processes by two core standards of resilience, that is, stress/adversity level and comprehensive adaptation outcome. Then, we conducted a 15-day follow-up study using experience-sampling technique, aiming to explore the differences in daily positive and negative emotion states, emotional complexity and emotion regulation strategies among high-, intermediate-, low-resilient college students. To conclude, the main findings are as follows:1. In daily life, the most frequently experienced emotions for college students were active, energetic, nervous, trembling with fear. Additionally, antecedent-focused regulation was used more frequently to regulate negative emotions, and mainly for down-regulation. Up-regulation strategies were used more frequently in positive emotion regulation.2. There were individual differences among high-, intermediate-, low-resilient college students in daily emotional states. Specifically, high-resilient individual has experienced positive emotion more frequently and more intensively. We computed an index of positive emotional experience by subtracting negative emotions from positive ones and found that high-resilient participants got more positive emotional experience than those with low resilience.3. College students with high resilience reported highest positive emotional granularity scores among 3 groups. Similar discrepancy wasn’t found in negative emotional granularity, emotion range and mixed emotions. Path analysis result showed that positive emotional granularity had a significant effect on resilience through positive emotion experience.4. There were also differences in emotion regulation strategies among high-, intermediate-, low-resilient individuals. High-resilient individuals released and expressed positive emotions more frequently, and rarely use suppression strategy. In contrast, low-resilient people used cognitive up-regulation strategies to regulate negative emotions.We can infer from the findings that, positive emotion were the building block of resilience, and the awareness, differentiation and regulation of positive emotion also had significant implication for personal adaptation. Different types of self-regulation strategies had positive or negative influence on physical and mental health. Exercise and guidance on self-regulation and emotion mindfulness will hopefully promote individual resilience.