Open Access

Solitude capacity and emotional experience in Chinese college students: The suppression effect of emotion regulation

Youming Song^*, Yuxin Li, Yin Wang, Yuan Xie, Gang Qiao, Jingyi Chen

School of Education Science, Yan’an University, Yan’an, 716000, China

* Corresponding Author: Youming Song. Email:

Journal of Psychology in Africa 2025, 35(1), 51-59. https://doi.org/10.32604/jpa.2025.065781

Received 22 February 2024; Accepted 21 September 2024; Issue published 30 April 2025

Abstract

Although numerous findings show that people experience both positive and negative experiences with regards to solitude, the relationship between solitude capacity and emotional experience remains unclear. The current study investigated the extent to which emotion regulation may play a suppressive role in the relationship between solitude capacity and emotional experience. Questionnaires on solitude capacity, emotion regulation, and emotional experience were completed by a sample of Chinese college students (n = 844; 432 females; Mean_age = 19.79 years, SD = 1.43 years). The results of the indirect effect test showed that cognitive reappraisal suppresses the prediction of solitude capacity on positive emotions, while the solitude capacity prediction of negative emotions was suppressed by both cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. This suggests that solitude capacity does not predict emotional experience directly, but instead is realized through an antagonistic system consisting of adaptive and nonadaptive emotion regulation strategies. These findings provide cross-sectional empirical support for the ecological niche hypothesis of solitude, and are of theoretical significance in clarifying the role of internal mechanisms of solitude capacity on the human emotional experience.

---

Keywords

---