Exploring undergraduates’ interpersonal emotion regulation in thesis supervision: a qualitative study of relationship-oriented strategies and motives

Supervisor-student relationships are fraught with emotional interactions that exert profound influences on thesis progress and the psychological well-being of both parties. Nevertheless, students’ proactive agency in shaping these relationships through interpersonal emotion regulation remains largely understudied, particularly in undergraduate thesis supervision contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and digital artifacts, this study examined ten Chinese undergraduates’ relationship-oriented interpersonal emotion regulation strategies and the motivational drivers. Data analysis yielded nineteen interpersonal emotion regulation strategies grouped into three categories: intrinsic, extrinsic and dual-target strategies. Supplementing the conventional binary intrinsic-extrinsic classification, the newly-identified dual-target interpersonal emotion regulation strategies captured students’ efforts to simultaneously influence both their own and their supervisors’ emotional experiences. These strategies were underpinned by distinct yet interrelated motives including navigating students’ own emotional struggles, promoting supervisors’ emotional well-being and exercising relational agency. Building on these findings, an integrative framework was developed to delineate the cyclical process in which students’ interpersonal emotion regulation efforts foster constructive supervisor-student relationships via three emotional-relational pathways, which in turn reshape their subsequent interpersonal emotion regulation practices. By repositioning undergraduates as proactive relational agents, this study challenges prevailing supervisor-centric interpretations of interpersonal emotion regulation within supervisory interactions and advances our understandings of student agency in hierarchical academic relationships, with implications for undergraduate thesis supervision.