No abstract

The present study examined Chinese adolescents' emotion regulatory tendency and its effect, using an Experience Sampling Method. Participants comprised 72 Chinese adolescents (M age = 15.2 yr., SD = 1.7; 36 girls). Momentary emotional experience and regulation was assessed up to 5 or 6 times each day for two weeks. Results showed that participants tended to use up-regulation when they experienced positive emotion and habitually regulated their negative emotion by down-regulation. Also, adolescents who utilized down-regulation in a certain sampling moment reported higher positive emotion at the subsequent sampling moment. Moreover, adolescents who utilized down-regulation more frequently reported higher positive emotion at the subsequent sampling moment. Overall, down-regulation seemed to be a more adaptive regulatory strategy than up-regulation in Chinese adolescents' emotional lives.

Sometimes people experience pleasant and unpleasant emotions at the same time in a single emotional event. Previous cross-cultural studies indicated that such mixed emotions are more prevalent in China and related to the attitudes toward happiness and individual’s regulatory motivation. However, China is a multi-ethnic country and not much is known about subcultural differences in mixed emotions. The aim of this study was to examine the role that implicit attitudes toward happiness and regulatory motivation played in regard of the subcultural differences in mixed emotions between Han (N = 61) and Mongolian Chinese (N = 46). Results indicated that, compared with Mongolian Chinese, Han Chinese showed stronger associations between implicit contra-hedonic attitudes toward happiness and mixed emotions during pleasant emotional events. Also, Han Chinese who reported contra-hedonic motivation during pleasant emotional events had higher levels of mixed emotions than those who had hedonic motivation. No significant differences were found in terms of mixed emotions between Mongolian Chinese who had contra-hedonic and hedonic motivation. These results suggest that the psychological mechanisms underlying differences in mixed emotions also require a more comprehensive understanding from a subcultural perspective.

No abstract

No abstract