The study, led by the University of Adelaide’s School of Psychology Lecturer Ella Moeck and published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion, surveyed 101 Belgian university students 10 times a day for a total of 10 days, while waiting for and after receiving their consequential exam grades.
In Belgium, almost all high school graduates can enrol in the university degree of their choice with the results of their first semester exams determining whether they can continue with their chosen degree. Of the survey participants, 83 per cent failed at least one of five end-of-semester exams.
Dr Moeck, with colleagues from the University of Melbourne and Stanford University (USA) tested the effects of emotion regulation strategies used by the students while they waited for and after they received their exam grades.
“The key difference between waiting for exam grades and receiving them, is that while you wait, the outcome is uncertain” Dr Moeck said.
The team looked at the effects of six strategies — distraction, reappraisal, acceptance, expressive suppression, rumination, and social sharing — on positive and negative emotions.
“Based on the vast literature on emotion regulation, the processes people use to change their emotions in desired ways, we know that some strategies generally have emotional benefits and others generally have emotional costs. But whether uncertainty changes these outcomes is unclear.”
-Dr Ella Moeck, School of Psychology, University of Adelaide
“Participants on average reported substantially higher levels of negative emotions and lower levels of positive emotions about their exam grades during the uncertain waiting period than the certain period, even though many of them failed an exam,” she said.
“In the waiting period, rumination, reappraisal, expressive suppression, and social sharing were associated with higher negative emotions; acceptance was associated with lower negative and higher positive emotions across both time periods.”
Dr Moeck said the findings suggest acceptance is helpful, regardless of whether an outcome is certain or uncertain.
“Accepting your emotions without judging them is becoming increasingly popular as an emotion regulation strategy, and our findings support this trend,” she said.
The findings also highlighted that strategies which usually help a person, such as reappraisal or social sharing, can backfire in uncertain situations.
“This finding was surprising, but more for reappraisal than social sharing,” said Dr Moeck.
“There is mixed evidence as to whether talking about your emotions with others is a helpful thing to do for improving how we feel; that’s not to say social sharing isn’t helpful for things like feeling supported by other people, but its emotional benefits are unclear.
“For reappraisal, it can be challenging to reconsider uncertain situations because there’s no clear outcome to reconsider.
“Once people have a clear outcome, even if it is disappointing, it becomes possible to reappraise the specific (and certain) outcome. For instance, failing an exam can be reappraised as a learning experience.”
The human brain wants to reduce uncertainty, but facing uncertainty is inevitable. Dr Moeck therefore sees establishing how uncertainty shapes emotion regulation as a priority.
“Uncertainty generally makes situations more emotionally difficult, a classic example is that it can be easier to deal with bad news than the prospect of bad news,” she said.
“When a situation is uncertain, it’s harder to change how we feel about it because we can’t really know how we feel about it.
“A lot of what we feel about a situation depends on how it goes, so when we don’t yet know how it goes, it’s hard to tie our efforts to regulate our emotions to something specific.
“Quite a few emotion regulation strategies rely on that specific outcome, so we perhaps need to think about how to adjust these strategies, so they do work when things are uncertain.”
The group is now seeking Australian graduate medical students to participate in a follow up study, focusing on how they feel and use emotion regulation strategies, while studying for their exams, as well as while waiting for the results and receiving them.
