An Experimental Study On The Impact Of Emotional Regulation On The Threat Of Stereotypes In Secondary Vocational Students

Meta-stereotype refers to a person’s beliefs regarding the stereotype that out-group members hold about their own group.The activation of meta-stereotypes would lead the social psychological dilemma and cognitive imbalance,inducing the experience of stress and fear,undermine the behavior of group members.Recently,deep study about the way to weaken and eliminate the negative influence of meta-stereotype threat is still lacking.Emotion and emotion regulation play a key role in meta-stereotype threat.Effective emotion regulation strategies can reduce cognitive load and improve working memory efficiency.Therefore,the current research select vocational school students as subject.Firstly,from direct and indirect level,the research examining the effect of meta-stereotype threat(MST)on the emotion of vocational school students by Group anxiety scale and Dot probe task(study1).Secondly,basing on Gross’ s emotion regulation process model,the research select two most common and valuable strategies to reduce emotional responses,that is Cognitive reappraisal(CR)and Expression suppression(ES),to examine the impact of different emotion regulation strategies on vocational school students’ working memory under the MST by N-back working memory task and Sentence unscrambling task(study2).The following results were observed: (1)The intergroup anxiety average score of MST group and non-MST group had no significant difference.(Direct measurement).(2)The Attentional bias to threatening stimuli of MST group was significantly greater than non-MST group.(Indirect measurement)(3)There were significant differences in the working memory scores of the subjects with different mood regulation strategies,and they differed with the difficulty of the task.The emotion regulation strategy have different effects on working memory of different difficulty level:(1)ACCURACY:In the 0-back working memory task,there was no significant difference among CR condition,ES condition and Control condition;In the 1-back working memory task,the accuracy of CR condition was significantly higher than ES and Control condition,and there was no significant difference between ES and Control condition;In the 2-back working memory task,the accuracy of CR and Control condition was significantly higher than ES condition,and there was no no significant difference between CR and Control condition.(2)REACTION TIME : The reaction time of 0-back working memory task was significantly lower than 1-,2-back working memory task;There was no significantly difference of reaction time between 1-back and 2-back working memory task.