Study On The Co-relationship Among The Cognitive Styles Of College Students And Parental Rearing Styles And Coping Styles

By means of Embedded Figure Test (EFT), EMBU and questionnaires on coping styles, this study is to explore the relationships between the cognitive styles and rearing patterns and the coping styles. The subjects were 450 sophomores. The study demonstrated:1. Gender, educational level and profession of parents have great influence on parental rearing patterns. Fathers have biased favor of the female subjects than the male subjects, while mothers are more likely to reject and deny males than females. On the part of fathers, the more education they receive, the more interference they exercise in their children's business. Fathers with the highest and lowest level of education exercise the most rejecting, denying and protection. Better-educated mothers show more preference for emotional warmness, understanding, over-interference and over-protection. As profession is concerned, cadres (intellectuals) won the first place in exercising over-interference, rejecting and denying, but show the least biased favor of the subjects. To the contrary, the most biased favor and least rejecting and denying are found with worker fathers and the least interference with farmer fathers. Higher-rank profession of mothers means more protection and interference but less biased favor of the subjects.2. Parental rearing patterns prove to be an most influential factor to the cognitive styles of university students. Fathers' over-interference and mothers' over-interference and over-protection lead to field-independence cognitive styles.3. Gender, liberal arts and science, parents' educational level and profession have great influence on coping styles. Female students overpass male students in help-seeking and fantasy; arts students stand high above science students insolving problems and seeking help. The higher professional rank fathers are in, the more likely the children are to adopt the coping style of help-seeking; it's true of the children whose mothers are dong high-rank jobs. But those whose mothers are at the average level of education prefer the coping style of fantasy. 4. Parental rearing patterns have great influence on university students' coping styles. There i s a significant positive co-relation between the positive coping styles as problem-solving, help-seeking and the parental rearing patterns of emotional warmness and understanding, and also between problems-solving and the biased favor of the subjects. Negative coping styles as self-blame, fantasy, withdrawal are positively r elated w ith fathers' s evere p unishment, b iased favor o f t he su bjects, over-protection, and mothers' rejecting and denying, in the meantime, negatively related with the parental rearing patterns as emotional warmness and understanding. The rationalization of mixed coping styles is positively related with mothers' rejecting and denying and fathers' severe punishment. It is fully demonstrated that parental rearing patterns are identical with the coping styles of university students. Positive parental rearing patterns are of vital importance to the forming of positive coping styles of children.