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As a multi‐ethnic country that is comprised of diverse cultural systems, there has been little research on the subcultural differences in emotional preferences in China. Also, little attention has been paid to examine how explicit and implicit attitudes towards emotions influence emotional preferences interactively. In this study, we manipulated explicit attitudes towards emotions among Han (N = 62) and Mongolian Chinese individuals (N = 70). We assessed participants' implicit attitudes towards emotions to explore their contributions to emotional preferences. (a) Han Chinese had lower preferences for pleasant emotions than Mongolian Chinese after inducing contra‐hedonic attitudes towards emotions, and (b) after priming contra‐hedonic attitudes towards emotions, the more Han Chinese participants evaluated pleasant emotions as negative implicitly, the less they preferred to engage in pleasant emotional activities. These findings contribute to the growing literature of subcultural differences and demonstrate that explicit and implicit attitudes towards emotions interactively influence individuals' emotional preferences between different subculture groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have suggested that academic stress has negative impact on adolescents’ psychological function, few of those studies, however, considered whether and how the impact of stress on adolescents’ emotional states is moderated by corresponding regulation. This study aimed to examine the fluctuation of emotional states before and after the mid-term examination and the influence of different emotional regulatory strategies. In the present study, 72 adolescents aged 12–18 reported their emotional states and corresponding regulation before and after mid-term examination up to six times over a period of two weeks. Results showed that: (a) On the sampling day, the participants reported increasingly emotional states as time went by. Improvement of adolescents’ daily emotional states was more significant after the mid-term examination. Participants reported decreasingly positive emotional states and increasingly negative ones as time went by before mid-term examination. (b) Adolescents who used down-regulation at a certain sampling moment reported more pleasant emotional states at the subsequent sampling moment than those who used up-regulation. Adolescents who used more up-regulation in a negative emotional event reported more negative emotional states at the subsequent sampling moment after the mid-term examination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is growing interest in understanding how beliefs about emotion regulation are related to individual emotional experiences. Extant studies have mainly focused on explicit beliefs about emotion regulation among individuals in Western societies. The current study examined implicit emotion regulation and explored their contributions to emotional outcomes in 147 Chinese adolescents. Participants were tested on their implicit beliefs about emotion regulation and their negative emotion experiences. Results showed that the down-regulation was implicitly evaluated as more positive than up-regulation. Moreover, positive implicit beliefs about down-regulation increased with age. Among younger adolescents, those who evaluated down-regulation more positively had less negative emotional experiences. These results suggest that down-regulation may have important implications in Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]