Emotional support from the perspective of extrinsic emotion regulation: insights of computer science doctoral supervisors

ABSTRACT

While higher education (HE) research has long recognized the importance of providing emotional support to doctoral students, empirical inquiries have barely investigated doctoral supervisors’ practice from the perspective of extrinsic emotion regulation. The current qualitative study used the framework of extrinsic emotion regulation (Gross 2014, 2015) to investigate 17 Chinese computer science doctoral supervisors’ strategies to improve their students’ emotions. Semi-structured interviews revealed that participants reduced students’ negative emotions and enhanced positive ones through antecedent-oriented approach, especially situation modulation strategy and cognitive change strategy. Response-oriented approach was also utilized albeit less commonly. The findings suggest that Chinese doctoral supervisors are concerned about students’ psychological wellbeing, but demonstrate remarkable variations in their emotion regulation strategy repertoire and flexibility in selecting and combining different approaches or strategies according to specific contexts. These variations further highlight the need for higher education institutions to provide professional training that fosters supervisors’ emotion regulation abilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral supervision
• emotional support
• extrinsic emotion regulation
• emotion regulation strategy

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful for all of the 17 doctoral supervisors who participated in our study. We also thank Dr. Kyle McIntosh in University of Tampa who helped edit the earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chinese Foundation of Social Science: [Grant Number #19CYY052].