Analysis of the Sex Difference on Negative Emotions among Adolescents

Numerous previous studies, either neural based or behavioral based, focused on the sex difference on responses to negative emotions, and received prominent results. However, literature particularly focusing on adolescents’ emotional situation is nearly silent in regard of sex difference. Given that modern adolescents suffer from great studying and living pressure, studying their emotional status and finding possible and optimal regulating strategy seems to be especially helpful for their health and life styles. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to discuss adolescents’ emotional status, especially negative emotions, and figure out the sex difference. The proposed method to achieve the goal is to assign questionnaires. Thus, a questionnaire that aims to collect adolescents’ emotional experiences and responses is designed and distributed to those between 14-18 years old. The researching content of this paper mainly includes three sections: 1. Subjects’ personal information and general emotional experience, such as the main cause of their emotional behaviors or the influences of these negative emotions. 2. How often they feel each type of negative emotions (using PANAS scale) 3. How often they use cognitive reappraisal(reinterpreting an event to give it new meaning) and expressive suppression(suppress the outward expression of emotion) to regulate their emotions in daily lives (using ERQ scale). The analysis and calculation of the collected data suggests that teenagers generally express more positive emotions compared with negative ones. Moreover, when it comes to emotion-regulating strategies, males tend to adopt both strategies in higher frequencies and the gender difference in the use of expressive suppression is prominent.