Nowadays, people's living standards are constantly improving, but mental confusion and pain are also coming one after another. Among them, social anxiety is considered by the World Health Organization to be the third most common mental health problem after depression and alcoholism.
Social anxiety may cause a series of problems in people's autonomic nervous system, among which accelerated heart rate, difficulty breathing, body trembling, sweaty palms and blushing are more common. Such performance will cause physical discomfort to individuals and affect their normal social functions.
Individuals with severe social anxiety are unable to engage in normal social interactions, which has a great negative impact on the individual's mental health and can also cause serious damage to the individual's life, work, and future development.
As an important period for individuals to mature mentally, college has a completely different lifestyle from high school, which requires college students to learn to rationally arrange their life patterns. In addition to busy schoolwork and exams, they also need to maintain close communication with classmates in daily life.
When you graduate, you also have to participate in interviews to enter the job. However, with the increasingly severe employment situation and rapid changes in physical and mental external conditions, college students are more prone to various psychological conflicts at this stage, making them unable to adapt well in social interactions.
Therefore, this period has become a high-risk stage for individual psychological problems, among which insomnia, anxiety, systemic tension, depression, etc. are more common, and social anxiety caused by many negative events has become a stumbling block for college students' external interpersonal communication.
Self-focus refers to paying close attention to an individual's own self, such as paying attention to one's own emotions, abilities, and thinking activities, without allocating attention resources to other things except oneself.
Individual self-awareness is more likely to develop significantly in college, so individuals at this stage are more inclined to evaluate themselves from multiple aspects and actively engage in activities related to self-exploration and self-image building.
When individuals with social anxiety enter anxiety-inducing situations, they will turn their attention to themselves. Therefore, self-focus has long been an important influencing variable in research related to social anxiety phenomena.
As one of the several core factors that affect the degree of individual social anxiety, the fear of negative evaluation plays a very important role in the field of clinical psychology . Specifically, it means that in social interactions, when individuals need to express themselves in front of many people, they are extremely sensitive to the opinions of others and worry that they will receive negative evaluations from others.
Long-term fear of negative evaluation can easily cause individuals to have a lot of tension about the current living environment, and eventually fall into a state of social anxiety. The psychological development of college students is not yet mature, and they often tend to rely on external evaluations to achieve self-positioning, making it difficult to accurately form an effective understanding of themselves.
Therefore, the individual's fear of negative evaluation prevents him from conducting normal social interactions with others, and social anxiety also arises from this. College students have heightened self-awareness and are more concerned about their physical and mental status. If they are not well guided and educated, it will lead to incorrect cognition, fear of negative evaluation, and social anxiety.
Secondly, college students need to have social interactions in their daily lives. After graduation, they also need to participate in job interviews. Cultivating good social interaction skills is conducive to their social development. Severe social anxiety is not conducive to the overall development of college students' physical and mental health, so research on college students' social anxiety has important practical significance.
Differences in self-focus, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety based on family location
There is no significant difference in the degree of self-focus and fear of negative evaluation among college students by place of origin, but the level of social anxiety among rural individuals is significantly higher than that among urban individuals. Analyzing the reasons, due to the different development levels between urban and rural areas, the living environment of rural students is different from that of urban students.
Since universities are generally located in cities, students in rural areas will experience a sense of difference when facing social activities, causing psychological pressure, thereby exacerbating their social anxiety. Some studies have pointed out that a large financial burden on the family can also cause individuals to feel anxious in social activities.
Rural families generally have more children and the family financial burden is heavier. Rural students will compare their family economic status with urban students, which affects their social confidence.
Differences in self-focus, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety on whether to stay behind
There is no significant difference in the degree of self-focus and fear of negative evaluation among college students on whether to stay behind. However, the level of social anxiety among individuals with left-behind experience is significantly higher than that of non-left-behind individuals.
Left-behind individuals who have been raised by relatives for most of their growth period lack the care and companionship they deserve from core family members, which makes them tend to adopt conservative and alienated strategies when communicating with others. Externally, they appear withdrawn and have tense relationships.
Therefore, if the foster carer cannot correctly grasp the growth state of mind of the left-behind individual or shows little care for him or her, it will easily cause the left-behind child to develop social anxiety.
The relationship between social anxiety and self-focus
The cognitive model in social anxiety-related theories believes that excessive self-focus in communication situations is the key cause of social anxiety. Correlation analysis shows that both the public self-concern dimension and the total level of self-concern are significantly related to social anxiety. This result further proves the theoretical model of social anxiety.
Individual self-concern levels are highly correlated with social anxiety, indicating that the social anxiety status of Chinese college students is consistent with this theoretical result.
Contemporary college students often pay more attention to themselves and are eager to show themselves, but excessive self-focus will affect the individual's objective communication performance. Therefore, if the individual can consciously reduce the level of self-focus, social anxiety can be appropriately reduced.
The relationship between social anxiety and fear of negative evaluation
There is a significant correlation between the level of social anxiety and the degree of fear of negative evaluation, and the degree of fear of negative evaluation among college students can positively predict their degree of social anxiety.
Individuals with a fear of negative evaluation always believe that every move they make will bring negative evaluation from others, and use this to build the outside world's subjective understanding of themselves. Therefore, when they are in social situations, they are always afraid that they will leave a bad impression on others and are in a state of tension, thus triggering social anxiety.
The relationship between self-focus and fear of negative evaluation
The correlation analysis between fear of negative evaluation and self-focus shows that there is a significant positive correlation between the level of fear of negative evaluation and the degree of self-focus. In the context of China's collectivistic culture , people pay more attention to social relationships and the evaluation of others, and the establishment of an individual's self-image also relies on family and other social groups.
As a relatively immature and stable group in the physical and mental development stage, college students often respond to the above situation by increasing their self-focus when faced with a sudden increase in social communication and diversified learning pressure.
However, along with the increase in individual self-focus is a corresponding increase in concern for negative evaluations from the outside world. Especially when freshmen face a new living environment and need to re-establish interpersonal relationships and hope that more people will recognize them, various worries will arise in their hearts.
The mediating role of fear of negative evaluation in the relationship between self-concern and social anxiety
The relevant results confirmed that the degree of self-concern of college students can not only directly predict their social anxiety, but also indirectly affect their social anxiety through the individual's fear of negative evaluation.
In a social situation, an individual's excessive focus on the self will make him more sensitive to external evaluation, thus fearing the emergence of negative evaluation, which will deepen his social anxiety over time. Fear of negative evaluation is a core representation of the cognitive behavioral model of social anxiety.
One of the important causes of social anxiety among college students is the fear of being negatively evaluated by the outside world in their interactions, which prevents them from carrying out and participating in normal social activities, which in turn causes individuals to develop social anxiety.
In summary, fear of negative evaluation plays a partial mediating role in the impact of self-focus on social anxiety. An individual's excessive self-concern will lead to a fearful attitude toward negative evaluations by others, resulting in excessive worry about one's own performance in interactions and further causing social anxiety.
suggests that
should pay attention to the role of individual self-focus and fear of negative evaluation in the intervention of social anxiety. You can start from the following aspects:
(1) By combining it with the actual situation of the individual, reasonably guide them to reduce their excessive focus on themselves and change their irrational cognition;
(2) By providing reasonable guidance and education on how to deal with external evaluation, so that they can better deal with the fear of negative evaluation.
Schools can carry out mental health lectures based on the current social anxiety status of college students, organize college students to participate in some group psychological counseling on related topics such as self-exploration and social activities, and enrich the content of college students' mental health courses. Let students learn to understand themselves objectively during the activities, reasonably deal with anxiety in social interactions, and practice communication skills.
research found that female college students have a significantly higher level of fear of negative evaluation than male college students. Therefore, schools can develop unique educational courses based on the psychological state and thinking characteristics of female college students based on psychological education activities.
guides female college students to improve their self-confidence, pay reasonable attention to themselves, and establish harmonious interpersonal relationships. Parents should understand the current psychological stage of college students, pay attention to their children's physical and mental health, strengthen communication with college students, and cultivate their positive and good psychological traits and behavioral habits.
Individual students should also participate in more campus activities to improve their understanding from getting along with others. When necessary, they can seek help from the mental health education center on campus and learn more complete social anxiety coping strategies.
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