Emotional Experience And Emotion Regulation Of Inland Senior Students From Xinjiang And Ordinary Inland Senior Students

Emotion is the important responsive tendency during.people’s development and social adjustment process, which includes physiological response, expressive behavior, and subjective experience (Gross & Levenson,1993; Gross,1998). It is a complex psychological activity which exerts huge influence on everyone’s daily life. Also, in the history of psychology as a discipline, emotion has always been a hot research topic for researchers. Emotion regulation is a process in which people manage and change the emotional status of themselves or others, and it is under the cooperation of both emotion and cognition. Emotion regulation involves both the drive and impact of emotion on cognition (emotions regulating) and the awareness and regulation of cognition (emotions regulated). In daily lives, there are individual differences of which emotion regulation strategies to use and how people use them, and those habits will impact people’s emotional experience and their social adjustment. What’s more, culture also contribute to the individual differences of emotion and emotion regulation. Previous researches show that people in culture where individualism prevails have stronger experience of positive emotion and negative emotion at the same time when compared with people in collectivist culture. In term of emotion regulation, there is evidence that people are encouraged to express their feelings when emotional events occur in western culture, but in oriental culture, it depends more on what type of the event, the social scenario and the subject of emotional expression when people choose whether to expose their emotional behaviors. So it is necessary to consider the specific cultural scheme when study the development of emotion and emotion regulation.The participants of this study are inland senior students from Xinjiang and ordinary students from inland China. They are different in cultural background. The research focuses on whether there are differences between the two groups on type of daily emotional events, emotional experience, use of emotion regulation strategies, purpose or goal of the emotion regulation, and social adjustment (self-esteem). In Study 1, Experience Sampling Method is used; in Study 2, cross-lagged regression analysis for longitudinal study, in which the time interval between T1 and T2 is 13 months.Results show that:(1) Significant differences are found between two groups on the type of daily emotional events, emotional experience, use of emotion regulation strategies and their purpose or goal; (2) For all adolescents, there is bi-directional predictive relationship between positive emotional experience and self-esteem. In the predictive effect of positive emotional experience on self-esteem, perceived social support acts as a moderator for Xinjiang students, but not for ordinary inland students.