Investigation And Intervention On Emotion Regulation Of Students In Boarding Junior Middle School

Adolescence is widely regarded as a "storm" period. During this period the emotional state of teenagers undergo great changes and its fluctuation is increasing. In adolescence individuals will experience the physical development of their bodies and the changes in their hormone levels. Furthermore, they will meet more and more challenges such as: the new learning environment, increasingly complex interpersonal interaction and heavy academic pressure as well. Unlike ordinary middle school students, in boarding junior middle school, the correlation between students and their family weakens while the one with their peers strengthens. Moreover, they’re also under the strict charge of their teachers. This special interpersonal environment brings more challenges to their adaptation and it may surely cause their emotional problems. Because of the increasing demands in adjusting mood among students in boarding junior middle school, it is an important task for them to adopt effective strategies in adjusting mood, improving confidence and making self-adjustment during the socialization development of their emotion. Currently there are many historical and empirical study of emotion regulation, but the attention to this special group, boarding junior middle school students, and the intervention studies of adolescent emotion regulation is not very abundant. This study tries to research on this aspect and make certain supplements.This research uses questionnaires to investigate the using habits of the strategy in emotion regulation among students in a boarding junior middle school in downtown area of Shanghai. Their self-efficacy is also included in the study. The questionnaires are ‘the Adolescent Daily Emotion Regulation’ and ‘the Emotion Regulation Self-efficacy’. The result shows that:(1) Generally speaking, students’ self-efficacy of emotion regulation in boarding junior middle school is in upper level. Their self-efficacy in feeling and adjusting the positive emotion is high, while the one in adjusting the negative emotion is low.(2) There’re gender differences in emotion regulation of students in boarding junior middle school: boys use more revealing strategy to regulate negative emotions than girls, and girls use more reappraisal strategy to regulate positive emotions than boys. Girls’ self-efficacy of feeling and adapting positive emotion is higher than boys.(3) There’re differences in emotion regulation in different grades among students inboarding junior middle school. These differences include the habit of using strategies to regulate negative emotion and the self-efficacy of feeling positive emotion and regulating general emotion.(4) For self-efficacy of general emotion regulation and the use of reappraisal strategy to adapt both positive and negative emotion among students in boarding junior middle school, the correlation is obviously positive. The correlation is also the case for the use of unleashing strategy to express positive emotion and restraining the negative emotion expression. But for the use of cognitive immersed strategy to adapt negative emotion, it is obviously negative.In this study, two classes of the boarding junior middle school, about 60 students in Grade Seven, are chosen to be observed. It aims at investigating the influence of the emotion education curriculum on students’ emotional regulation by experiment. The self-compiled course materials based on a variety of emotion theories are used by the experimental classes. There’s one lesson once a week, totally 10 times, for the experimental classes, while there’s no lesson for the comparative classes. The effect of the intervention and evaluation of the curriculum is measured both at the beginning and at the end of the experiment. The result shows the following.(1) The teaching plan about emotion education designed in the study can effectively optimize students’ using habit of emotion regulation strategy in boarding junior middle school. Due to the intervention from the emotion education curriculum, students in boarding junior middle school can adopt more cognitive reappraisal, expression suppression strategy and less cognitive immersed strategies. The change is also active that they adopt more cognitive reappraisal, cognitive immersed, expressing anger strategy to regulate positive emotion.(2) The designed teaching plan about emotion education in the study can effectively improve the self-efficacy of emotion regulation of students in boarding junior middle school. By intervention of the emotion education curriculum, the self-efficacy of feeling positive emotion, the self-efficacy of regulating depressed or angry emotion, the general self-efficacy of emotion regulation of students in boarding junior middle school have been obviously or extremely improved than before.