Today, with the rapid development of Chinese society, the increase in competitive pressure will cause everyone to experience a certain degree of anxiety at some point.
Although anxiety can bring discomfort to individuals, moderate anxiety can stimulate our potential and improve work efficiency, while excessive anxiety can damage our physiological functions and affect our mental health. Among the many situations that can cause anxiety, social anxiety is one of the more prominent ones.
Adolescents are in a transitional stage in life. During this stage, individuals begin to shift more time and attention from the external world to self-awareness. They become more sensitive to everything about themselves and are more likely to have negative emotional experiences.
’s research on adolescent mental health shows that anxiety has become a common negative emotional experience among adolescents. Teenagers are in a critical period of self-understanding and self-discovery, and normal social interactions are of great significance to their self-understanding and social development.
However, for those teenagers affected by social anxiety, their exploration of self-awareness and social development are bound to be affected. Therefore, it is very necessary for their healthy growth to study the influencing factors of adolescent social anxiety and take certain defensive measures accordingly.
Social learning theory believes that children acquire some social behaviors mainly through observation and learning of role models. Children's development is the result of the interaction between individuals, behaviors and the environment.
Therefore, in the early stages of children's development, as parents are role models who have close relationships with children, their communication patterns and the family environment they jointly create will definitely affect children's mental health and social patterns.
The ecological system theory proposed by Bronfenbrenner believes that developing individuals are nested in a series of environmental systems that interact with each other. In these systems, the system interacts with individuals and affects their development.
He divided the ecological environment in individual development into four different levels of systems: microsystem, mesosystem, outer system, and macrosystem. Only microsystem is the direct environment in which individuals actually participate and has the most direct impact on individuals. Therefore, for most children, parents in the microsystem will directly affect the social development of children.
Based on the above two theoretical perspectives, it can be found that in the early stages of adolescent development, parents play an important role in their development. Existing research has proven that the factors that affect adolescent social anxiety include not only the individual's own internal factors, but also external environmental factors.
Among external environmental factors, the harmonious relationship between parents is one of the important predictors. Existing research has shown that parents' marital quality can negatively predict preschool children's implicit and explicit behavioral problems, and parents' violent behavior in family life is significantly negatively correlated with the psychological quality of middle school students.
In real family life, parents are likely to have conflicts at any time due to work pressure, housework, children's education and other issues.
In the face of sudden parental conflicts, most children are often at a loss. They can only passively bear the adverse effects of parental conflicts, but do not know how to reduce such adverse effects.
In recent years, with the rise of positive psychology, researchers have begun to pay attention to the positive power of individuals themselves and advocate a positive attitude towards problems encountered. In real life, we always encounter problems of one kind or another. When a problem arises, everyone can make their own understanding of the problem from their own perspective.
Positive psychology advocates that individuals seek the positive meaning of problems from two aspects. One is to explore the root causes of problems from multiple aspects, and the other is to obtain positive experiences from the problems themselves. It should be noted that the emergence of problems actually provides individuals with an opportunity to demonstrate their excellent qualities and potential abilities.
Combined with the current academic background and considering the practical significance of the research, the research attempts to explore the mechanism of different aspects of parental conflict in affecting the social anxiety of middle school students from a new perspective, thereby providing some opinions and suggestions for solving the problem of social anxiety of middle school students from the perspective of the family environment.
1. Discussion on the relationship between perceived parental conflict, cognitive emotion regulation and social anxiety among middle school students
Conflict characteristics include three dimensions: conflict frequency, conflict intensity, and conflict resolution. A high score on conflict characteristics indicates high conflict frequency, high conflict intensity, and poor conflict resolution between parents. The positive correlation between
conflict characteristics and social anxiety shows that if the conflict between parents is high in frequency and intensity, and cannot be properly resolved, the level of social anxiety among middle school students will also become very high.
Threat cognition includes two dimensions: threat perception and coping efficacy. A high threat cognition score indicates that middle school students will have a high sense of mental oppression during the conflict between their parents, and feel overwhelmed by the conflict between their parents and unable to cope with it.
Threat cognition and social anxiety are positively correlated, indicating that during the process of parental conflict, the higher the threat cognition of middle school students, the higher the level of social anxiety. Self-attribution means that children attribute the cause of parental conflict to themselves and believe that it is their own fault that caused the quarrel between their parents.
Social learning theory believes that children's behavioral habits are gradually learned by imitating role models. Conflict characteristics are positively related to social anxiety because the relationship between parents in the family is a model for children to interact with other people.
If verbal quarrels or even physical violence often occur between parents, the children in the family will be prone to fights when interacting with others, or they will try to avoid various interpersonal activities for fear of quarrels.
For middle school students, their parents are not only their material life support, but also their important spiritual support. Threat cognition is positively related to social anxiety because during conflicts between parents, children are often full of worry, fear, nervousness, and feel that their parents do not love them. At this time, they will seek love and warmth from others.
In order to get the love and likes of others, they are more likely to cater to others, and are more worried about whether their words and deeds can be recognized by others.
At the same time, if children feel unable to deal with conflicts between their parents, they will doubt their own abilities and even deny themselves. This sense of inability to deal with parental conflicts makes them more likely to worry about conflicts that may occur when interacting with other people.
2. Discussion of the mediating mechanism of negative emotion regulation between middle school students’ perceived parental conflict and social anxiety
Negative emotion regulation plays a complete mediating role between conflict characteristics and social anxiety, indicating that conflict characteristics do not directly affect middle school students’ social anxiety, but affect middle school students’ social anxiety by affecting their negative emotion regulation. For middle school students, parents are an important source of support for their material and spiritual lives.
Children who grow up in a family environment where quarrels often occur are likely to find it difficult to have an optimistic attitude towards other people and things in society because their parents lack care and love for them.
Previous research has shown that perceived parental conflict can significantly predict individual attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Conflict between parents will not only cause harm to the parties involved, but also damage the relationship between parents and children, affecting their parent-child attachment.
Children's insecure attachment to their parents makes them always feel uneasy and full of worry and fear in the process of understanding the world and interacting with others, which in turn affects their normal social interactions and produces social anxiety.
Negative emotion regulation plays a partial mediating role between threat cognition and social anxiety, indicating that threat cognition can not only directly affect social anxiety of middle school students, but also affect social anxiety through negative emotion regulation.
Middle school students in adolescence are very sensitive to everything happening around them, and even an extremely small thing can cause them to have strong emotional experiences.
If a middle school student feels that parental conflict will affect the stability of the entire family, and his parents do not care for him as much as before, he will have a sense of crisis and panic. This strong sense of uneasiness will make him afraid that others will not like him when he gets along with others around him, resulting in anxiety in the process of interpersonal communication.
In the process of parental conflict, if a middle school student feels that he is unable to deal with this kind of family conflict, he will be disappointed in himself.
This feeling of lack of confidence causes him to adopt a negative attitude when encountering other interpersonal problems. The result of this often makes his interpersonal relationships more tense, thus exacerbating his anxiety.
Negative emotion regulation does not play a mediating role between self- attribution and social anxiety, indicating that self-attribution does not affect negative emotion regulation, but directly affects the social anxiety of middle school students.
3. Suggestions
mainly makes the following two suggestions to reduce the social anxiety of middle school students:
(1) From the perspective of parents, when they have different views on the same thing, they can find reasonable solutions through communication and try to reduce unnecessary conflicts between couples.
Even if a conflict occurs, it must be resolved properly as soon as possible to reduce the duration and scope of the conflict. For those parents who use quarreling as a way of communication, they may need to calm down their excited emotions after the quarrel, explain the cause and result of the quarrel to their children, and eliminate their children's doubts.
(2) From the perspective of students, it is necessary to correctly understand parental conflicts and make objective and reasonable attributions. When conflicts occur between parents, active and effective coping methods should be adopted to alleviate the negative emotions caused by the conflict.
On the one hand, you can seek help from friends or teachers at psychological institutions. On the other hand, you can also actively communicate with your parents after their emotions calm down.
explores the reasons for parents' quarrels, expresses their feelings to them, makes parents understand the pain caused by conflicts between them, and makes parents pay attention to the adverse impact of family conflicts on their children's growth.
