The Effect Of Strategy-Using Hints On Emotion Regulation

In the field of emotion psychology,emotion regulation is a topic that has been widely concerned by researchers.Emotion regulation refers to the process that individuals consciously or unconsciously regulate their emotions to meet the needs of the situation,which includes both the goal of emotion regulation and the strategy of emotion regulation.Under the classical framework of emotion regulation research,some studies believe that individual emotion regulation goals can achieve the effect of emotion regulation.In recent years,automatic emotion regulation has attracted more and more researchers’ attention.Automatic emotion regulation is a process of self-regulation of emotion by individuals in an unconscious or automatic way driven by goals.Automatic emotion regulation requires little or no cognitive resources to reduce negative emotions.Implementation intention is an “if-then” plan and it is a common research paradigm of automatic emotion regulation.It is found that compared with Implementation intention,goal intention is less effective in regulating emotion.In both research frameworks,there is some debate about the effect of emotion-regulation goals.Through analysis,the experimental paradigms of the two different results are different,and the connotations of the instructions are also different.In classical studies on emotion regulation,instructions not only contain the goal of emotion regulation,but also include hints on the use of strategies.Although the specific emotion regulation strategies were not directly taught to the subjects,the availability of effective emotion regulation strategies may be increased by reminding the subjects to use the strategies,thus promoting the effect of the pursuit of emotional goals.Therefore,this study explored the effect of emotion strategy-using hints on goal pursuit.If the strategy using hints has an effect,can this regulating effect be generalized to the pursuit of other emotional goals?The main content of this study includes three parts.The first part evaluates the connotation of the two instructions respectively through expert evaluation and questionnaire survey.The second part explores the effect of automatic strategy-using hint on emotional goal pursuit.The third part explores the generalization effect of strategy-using hint on emotional goal pursuit.In the first part,15 people with professional background of psychology evaluated the connotation of the two instructions,and then asked ordinary college students to evaluate the connotation of the instructions through questionnaire survey.The results of expert review and questionnaire survey are consistent,that is,the instructions 1 only contains the goal of emotion regulation,and does not contain the use of emotion regulation strategies.Instructions 2 contains not only the goal of emotion regulation,but also hints for the use of emotion regulation strategies.In the second part,subjects were randomly assigned to four groups: passively watch group(just watch experimental stimulus),goal group(" I will not sick "),goal +specific strategy group(" I won’t be sick,if I see blood,then I will take the perspective of a physician ")and goal + strategy-using hints(I won’t feel hate,if see blood,so I will try to take some ways to adjust my mood).Each participant was asked to respond to both disgusting and neutral images,rating each image on a nine-point scale for its valence and arousal.The results show that both the group of goal + strategy-using hints and the group of goal + specific strategy can achieve the effect of emotion regulation,and the effect of goal + strategy-using hints is better.In the third part,subjects were randomly assigned to five groups: Passively watch group(just need to watch the experiment stimulus),abstract goal group(" I won’t produce negative emotions "),abstract goal + specific strategy group(" I won’t produce negative emotions,if I see blood,then I will take the perspective of an artist "),abstract goal + strategy-using hints group(" I won’t produce negative emotions,if I see blood,then I will try to take some ways to adjust my mood ")and the specific goal +strategy-using hints group(" I won’t be sick,if I see blood,then I will try to take some ways to adjust my mood ").Each participant was asked to respond to disgusting,fearful and neutral images,and to rate each image on a nine-point scale for its valence and arousal.The results show that abstract goal + specific strategy,specific goal +strategy-using hints,and abstract goal + strategy-using hints can all regulate fear,which indicates that the three have the generalization effect of emotion regulation.In addition,the generalization effect of specific goal + strategy using hints and abstract goal +strategy using hints is better than that of abstract goal + specific strategy.In conclusion,the results of this study indicate that strategy-using hints have an effect on the effect of goal pursuit in emotion regulation,and this effect is more effective than the direct instruction of the participants to use a specific emotion regulation strategy.In addition,the effect of strategy-using hints can be generalized to other emotions.This study can provide a new way of thinking for emotion regulation--sometimes the effect of emotion regulation can be achieved only by reminding individuals to use strategies,which increases the flexibility and adaptability of emotion regulation in daily life.