| Since the beginning of the 21 st century,China has gradually entered an ageing society and the number of elderly people is increasing year by year.Along with the weakening of physical functions,the number of elderly people who have lost the ability to take care of themselves in daily life is also increasing.As the overall number of elderly care institutions in China is relatively small,and the existing ones suffer from a lack of professional caregivers,inadequate elderly care facilities and expensive elderly care costs,family care is currently the main form of elderly care in China.Especially in rural areas where the economic income is low and the standard of living and medical care is poor,the physical condition of the elderly is generally poor,and the responsibility of caring for the elderly is mainly concentrated on one family member,which makes the carer physically and mentally exhausted due to the heavy burden of long-term care and the pressure of life.There are many policies and activities to help the elderly by the government and social welfare organisations,but very few support activities for carers of the elderly.In fact,for a long time to come,family caregiving will be the main model of caregiving in China,and the physical and mental health of elderly caregivers is directly related to the quality of the care services they provide to the elderly.Therefore,if we want to create a harmonious and sustainable model of caregiving,we should not only pay attention to the psychological health of the elderly,but also to the psychological health of their caregivers.A large number of studies have now found that carers of older people are more likely to experience some negative emotions than other non-elderly carers in the same situation due to the long-term burden of caring,and of these older people are divided into those who are disabled and those who are not,depending on how well they are able to care for themselves.Previous research has found that older people with disabilities are more dependent on their caregivers and create a greater caregiving burden,which often leads to more negative emotions,such as anxiety and depression,for caregivers of older people with disabilities than for non-elderly caregivers in the same situation.However,could there be differences in the processing of negative emotions between carers of older people with disabilities and carers of older people without disabilities,both of whom carry the burden of caring for older people,depending on the level of caregiving burden they are carrying?Therefore,this study will explore the above issues through the following three behavioural experiments.Experiment 1 examined differences in the subjective experience of emotional pictures between disabled and non-disabled elderly caregivers through a subjective rating task of emotional pictures and found that subjects in the non-disabled elderly caregiver group rated their emotional validity significantly higher than subjects in the disabled elderly caregiver group.The interaction between picture type and subject type was significant,and further simple effects analysis showed that in the negative emotion condition,subjects in the dysfunctional elderly care group rated emotional pictures significantly lower than subjects in the non-dysfunctional elderly care group.This suggests that long-term care of the disabled elderly has an effect on the caregivers’ subjective experience of emotions,i.e.their subjective experience of emotional stimuli is more negative.To further explore whether the differences in the subjective experience of emotional stimuli between subjects in the disabled elderly care group and those in the non-disabled elderly care group in Experiment 1 were caused by differences in their cognitive reappraisal abilities,we conducted Experiment 2.Experiment 2 examined the difference in cognitive reappraisal ability in emotion regulation between subjects in the disabled elderly care group and subjects in the non-disabled elderly care group through a cognitive reappraisal task,and the results showed that the difference in cognitive reappraisal ability between subjects in the disabled elderly care group and subjects in the non-disabled elderly care group was not significant.Experiment 3 examined the degree of tolerance to negative emotional stimuli between the disabled elderly care group subjects and the non-disabled elderly care group subjects by means of a negative emotional tolerance task,and the independent samples t-test showed that the negative emotional tolerance of the non-disabled elderly care group subjects was significantly higher than that of the disabled elderly care group subjects.In conclusion,there is a difference in the subjective experience of emotional stimuli between subjects in the caregiving group and those in the non-caregiving group,and this difference is not due to a difference in their cognitive reappraisal.In addition,although the caregiving group had a heavier caregiving burden,for practical reasons,they could not avoid the event of caring for the disabled elderly and had to face and endure this long-term caregiving task,which in the long run led to a significantly lower negative emotional tolerance in the disabled elderly care group than in the non-disabled elderly care group. |
