Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy and Subjective Well-being：the Mediating Effect of Style of Emotional Regulation

DOU Kai; ZHE Yan-Gang; YU Yu-Ji; LIU Yi; LI Jian-Bin

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (1) : 139-144.

Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy and Subjective Well-being：the Mediating Effect of Style of Emotional Regulation

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Abstract

Regulatory emotional self-efficacy is a widely concerned issue in recent years. It is defined as the individuals’ confidence level of successfully managing their emotion. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy helps mitigate emotional tension, maintain self-control effective and improve one’s ability of self-control towards emotional impulsiveness. As an essential social competency, regulatory emotional self-efficacy has been demonstrated to impose various effects on the processes of attention, memory and motive. Failure in managing one’s emotion will easily result in affective dysfunctions and then decrease one’s subjective well-being. Previous research has found that there are large differences in the effect of emotional regulatory, which not only result from the ability or skill in regulating one’s emotion, but also from the perceived self-efficacy. On the ground of the above reasoning, the current study hypothesized that: (1) regulatory emotional self-efficacy will directly influence subjective well-being; (2) people with different regulatory emotional self-efficacy may choose different style of emotional regulation; (3) people using different emotional managing strategies will show different positive and negative expression, and further influence their subjective well-being. Regulatory Emotion Self-Efficacy Scale (Revised), Regulatory Emotional Style Questionnaire, Youth Life Satisfaction Scale and Happiness Scale were administered to 1128 middle school students. Pearson correlation, hierarchical regression and structural equation modeling statistical method were adopted to analyze the data. The results showed that: (1) regulatory emotion self-efficacy positively correlated with life satisfaction; (2) style of emotional regulatory was associated with subjective well-being; (3) SEM analysis showed that style of mitigating regulation could serve as the mediating variable between regulation emotion self-efficacy and subjective well-being, and the mediating effect between positive affect expression and subjective well-being as well as negative affect inhibition and subjective well-being were 0.017 and 0.046, respectively. On the basis of these findings, we may conclude that adolescent may experience more subjective well-being when they can effectively amplify their positive affects and manage negative their affects. More importantly, the mechanism of why regulatory emotional self-efficacy affects subjective well-being may be partly due to what regulatory styles people choose. The present study contributes to current literature and promotes our understanding on regulatory emotional self-efficacy and may be applied to improving adolescents’ mental health.

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Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy / Subjective Well-being / Approach of Emotion Regulatory / Adolescent

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Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy and Subjective Well-being：the Mediating Effect of Style of Emotional Regulation[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(1): 139-144

References

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