A Study On The Effects Of Emotional Regulation Strategies On College Students’ English Vocabulary Memory

In 2012,the introduction of positive psychology into the field of second language acquisition broke the cognitive dominance of the second language acquisition field,and emotion-related topics are gradually gaining attention.Positive emotions directly or indirectly contribute to cognitive activities,while negative emotions can somewhat hinder cognitive activities.Therefore,it is necessary for college students to use emotion regulation strategies to cope with various negative emotions,reduce the occupation of cognitive resources by negative emotions,and thus improve memory effectiveness.Previous studies have found that emotion regulation strategies have important effects on memory of language materials,but most of the memory materials use the subjects’ native language,and few studies involve second language materials.Emotional regulation strategies have an impact on the memory of subjects’ native language materials;whether it affects the memory of second language materials mediated by native language is still lacking solid empirical support.This study took three classes of sophomore non-English students as subjects and randomly assigned three classes to cognitive reappraisal strategy group,expression suppression strategy group,and non-strategy group.To induce students’ negative emotions by presenting negative pictures.The purpose was to simulate the negative emotions in daily life that affect students’ cognitive activities.And to explore whether different emotion regulation strategies can alleviate students’ negative emotions during word memorization and thus help English vocabulary memory.This study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What are the effects of emotion regulation strategies on college students’ negative emotions when memorizing words?(2)Which emotion regulation strategy is more effective for college students’ English vocabulary memory?(3)What are students’ attitudes toward the use of emotion regulation strategy in the process of vocabulary memorization?Before the experiment began,specific examples and instructions were used to help subjects understand how to use emotion regulation strategy.Negative pictures and vocabulary learning materials were presented in the form of PPT auto-play,during which students were asked to use emotion regulation strategy to regulate their emotions and to memorize words.An immediate test was conducted at the end of the experiment,and a delayed test was conducted one week later.This study consisted of three immediate tests and three delayed tests.Three subjects were randomly selected from each group to be interviewed at the end of the three experiments.The results of the study are as follows:(1)Both the cognitive reappraisal strategy and the expressive suppression strategy are effective in reducing students’ negative emotions when memorizing words,and the cognitive reappraisal strategy is more effective than the expressive suppression strategy.(2)The cognitive reappraisal strategy facilitates the English vocabulary memory of college students in negative emotional states.As the number of cognitive reappraisal strategy used increases,the students’ vocabulary memory scores gradually improve.The expression suppression strategy cannot facilitate the English vocabulary memory of college students in negative emotional states,and the vocabulary memory scores does not improve with the increase in the number of uses.(3)From the results of the interview,it can be seen that participants believe that negative emotions hurt memorizing words and other learning activities,and using emotion regulation strategy can alleviate negative emotions.Therefore,participants think that it is necessary and willing to use emotion regulation strategy in future learning activities.