How Emotion Regulation Strategies Affect Mood Before Exams: Does Context Matter?

• In Event: Turning That Frown Upside Down: Emotion Regulation in Achievement Settings

Abstract

With the impending approach of exams, it is common for students to experience an increase in negative emotions. Due to the negative short-term (e.g, increased bad mood; Abro, Klein, Manzoor, Tabatabaei, & Treur, 2015) and long-term effects (e.g., decreased motivation and self-regulated learning; Goetz & Hall, 2013; Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002) of negative emotions, it is in students best interest to regulate these experiences. However, to date there is a lack of research on how to regulate emotions experienced in achievement contexts (e.g., exams, in class, studying, etc.). Our aim was to explore if the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies depends on the context in which the emotion is experienced (i.e., exam-related vs. non-exam-related emotions).
A total of 68 university psychology and education students (90% female, Mage = 20.6 years, SDage = 4.2 years) participated in this study. Using the experience sampling method (random interval sampling; Compliance of 92.5%), students were given an electronic device, on which they answered 5 questionnaires over 6 days. Students reported their current experiences of anxiety and frustration (exam-related or non-exam-related), mood (valence: wellbeing and contentment; arousal: awake and energy) and usage of emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal, suppression, expression, and distraction; see Table 1). To distinguish exam-related from non-exam-related emotions, we asked if students had been thinking about the exam in the past hour, which was the case 59.8% of the time. Results were separately analyzed for each emotion in multi-level regression models (see Table 2 for null models and Table 3 for regression models).
We found that the context influenced the effectiveness of some of the emotion regulation strategies (see Figure 1). For anxiety, there was a significant Suppression x Context and Distraction x Context interaction on mood. High levels of suppression negatively affected feeling content when experiencing non-exam-related anxiety but positively affected feeling content when experiencing exam-related anxiety. High levels of distraction did not influence wellbeing or contentment for exam-related anxiety but had a positive effect on wellbeing and contentment for non-exam-related anxiety. The context did not influence the effectiveness of using reappraisal or expression to regulate anxiety. For frustration, there was a significant Suppression x Context interaction on mood. Suppression improved feeling awake for exam-related frustration but had no effect on feeling awake for non-exam-related frustration. The context did not influence the effectiveness of using reappraisal, expression or distraction to regulate frustration.
So how should emotions be regulated? As the results of our study show, there is no straight forward answer to this question. We found that the effectiveness of the emotion regulation strategy used depends on the context (exam-related vs. non-exam-related) in which the emotion is experienced. Thus, researchers shouldn’t classify emotion regulation strategies as beneficial or harmful. Our results align with recent findings that suppression is in some situations helpful rather than maladaptive (Burić, Sorić, & Penezić, 2016; Catterson, Eldesouky, & John, 2016). The findings of this study highlight the need to consider the context in which the emotion is experienced when examining the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies.

Authors

• Anna-Lena Rottweiler

• Jamie Taxer, Stanford University

• Ulrike Elisabeth Nett, Augsburg University