Background <p>Negative interactions in collaborative learning can impact students’ emotions, making emotion regulation a critical factor. This study investigates the causes of negative emotions in online collaborative learning, explores the underlying reasons for these emotions, and identifies other issues contributing to learners’ negative emotional experiences. Additionally, it examines the types of emotion regulation strategies learners employ to manage their emotions and mitigate these challenges.</p> Method <p>This study investigates the factors leading to social negative emotions among learners in the online collaborative learning environment and examines the types of emotion regulation learners employ during collaboration. Building on existing research, the study reclassifies socio-emotional problems within the context of online collaboration. It introduces a new scale for measuring negative social emotions in online collaborative learning and a corresponding scale for assessing the instrumental aspects of emotion regulation. Data for the scales and WeChat were collected from 44 learners enrolled in modern educational technology courses at Chinese provincial normal universities.</p> Results <p>The findings indicate that problems related to goal motivation are more likely to trigger learners’ social negative emotions. To better cope with these social negative emotions, learners typically employ socially shared regulation. Further analysis through Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis reveals that ER, CoER, and SSER all show significant negative correlations with social negative emotions. Among them, SSER exhibits a stronger negative correlation with social negative emotions and forms the best regression model for negative affect.</p> Conclusions <p>These findings enhance our understanding of the sources of negative emotions in online collaborative learning and inform more effective social regulation strategies, which are crucial for improving its overall quality.</p>