Regulate Guilt By Reappraisal:The Difference Between Adolescents And Adults

Guilt is a negative self-conscious emotion that is caused by violation of individual’s internal social standards.Guilt may lead to emotional problems such as depression,and harm individual’s social relations.Using effective emotional regulation strategies to reduce guilt is very important for both adults and adolescents.Detachment and reinterpretation can effectively reduce negative emotions,which are two sub strategies of reappraisal.Different emotions will affect the regulation success of adolescents and adults.The purpose of this study is to examine whether adolescents and adults can use these two strategies to reduce guilt,and which strategy is more effective.Studyl used autobiographical recall to compare the regulation success of detachment and reinterpretation between adolescents aged 15 to 16 years and adults aged 18 to 22 years in two experiments.The results showed that adolescents and adults were able to use detachment and reinterpretation to reduce guilt,and regulation success of adolescents were lower than adults.In order to compare the regulation success of detachment and reinterpretation,study2 used mixed design,in which strategies and emotion were within-subjects variables,and used emotion react-regulation task with standardized emotion scenario to induce guilt or sad.The results show that for adolescents the regulation success of detachment is better than reinterpretation.For regulation success of detachment,adolescent is worse than adults.For regulation success of reinterpretation,there is no difference between adolescents and adult.The results of study 1 and study 2 suggest that during the development,effectiveness of detachment has improved,and close to the reinterpretation.Practice can help to improve effectiveness of reinterpretation.