Implicit benefits of adolescents with high psychological resilience in action control of emotion regulation

Abstract

Psychological resilience is crucial for adolescents’ emotional health. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between psychological resilience and implicit emotion regulation. The action control theory was used as a model reference. Experiment 1 employed an emotion regulation-implicit associations task using a sample of 56 adolescents and was designed to compare implicit attitudes toward emotion regulation between individuals with high and those with low psychological resilience. The results reveal that adolescents with high psychological resilience are more inclined to use controlled emotion regulation to regulate their emotions. Experiment 2 was an indirect examination of the differences between the implicit emotion repair effects of adolescents with high and those with low psychological resilience (n = 75). The findings indicate that adolescents with high (vs. low) psychological resilience search faster to detect happy faces in an angry context. The results of the two experiments consistently suggest that adolescents with high psychological resilience have an implicit advantage in emotion regulation, which contributes to their emotional health.