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.