Development of Instrument Measuring Implicit Emotion Regulation Strategies in Sports and Non-Sports Contexts

Objective:This study aimed to develop a set of measuring instrument which can measure the use of implicit emotion regulation strategies between sports and non-sports groups in different contexts, and this tool can diagnose and evaluate one's implicit emotion regulation strategies.Method:1) Through investigating 436 sports and non-sports students, we selected the words which represent cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression respectively, and wrote 256 sentences with these words;then using 40 college students as new samples, we identified 96 sentences for measuring tool material based on their selection bias and reaction time, then we wrote the task program of measuring implicit emotion regulation strategies with these sentences.2) To test the effect of task program, 85 students re-selected as subjects completed measures of the task program, which measured emotional reactions to the pictures and selection bias of sentences task before and after the priming of implicit emotion regulation goal, meanwhile we recorded the heart rate and skin conductance of the subjects using MP150 multichannel physiological recorder when they were viewing the emotional pictures.Results:There were significant differences of heart rate and skin conductance before and after the goal priming, it indicates that the instrument have effectively primed the implicit emotion regulation goal;sentence task could measure five types of implicit emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal, expression suppression, cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression, others besides cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression, no specific strategy) ;Further analysis found that there were differences of strategies adopted by the sports and non-sports groups in the face of different contexts.Conclusion:The instrument developed in this research can effectively measure implicit emotion regulation strategies of the individuals corresponding to different contexts.