The Role Of Academic Social Comparison In Negative Emotions: Mediation By Task Relevance And Self-affirmatio

Based on the classical social comparison theory,people in daily life often need to know a series of information about their own level,such as people’s ability level,social status,wealth level and so on.Therefore,many studies will focus on how people conduct self-evaluation through social comparison,and some studies will focus on the reasons why people conduct social comparison due to various motives.However,the process of people’s social comparison and the impact and results of social comparison on individuals will have significant changes in individual psychology and behavior.Therefore,this study will focus on the issues related to the results of social comparison,especially the impact of social comparison on personal emotion.Negative emotions can cause all kinds of harm to people,so this study will focus on the key outcome variable of negative emotions after social comparison.In social comparative research,different researchers pay different attention to different issues,and there are also various differences in the research scenes and the cultural background of the research.Therefore,the research results of social comparison on individual emotions are not particularly stable and consistent.Moreover,the process of social comparison itself is a process of individual thinking and judgment.People in different cultural backgrounds may have different thinking angles and ways.Therefore,in the process of social comparison,there are many variables that will have an impact on the comparison process and results.This study selects the experimental scenario of learning task to analyze the impact of social comparison of learning achievement on individuals’ negative emotions.The research will focus on the direction of social comparison,the correlation between comparison content and self,and the intervention after comparison in order to understand the impact of social comparison on individual negative emotions.In Experiment 1,in the learning situation,the participants were clearly informed of the comparison information of the average score between the participants and other peers participating in the test,so as to manipulate the direction of social comparison,so as to observe the impact of different social comparison directions of academic performance on individual negative emotions.In Experiment 2,the correlation between the experimental task and the individual was considered,and whether the feedback information of academic performance had a comparative impact on the individual’s negative emotion.In Experiment 3,after investigating the social comparison,whether self-affirmation has a significant impact on individual negative emotions.Through the above three studies,we explore the impact of the process of social comparison on individual negative emotions.The results show that in Experiment 1,the direction of social comparison has a significant impact on individual negative emotions.Specifically,when individuals are making upward social comparison,they produce higher scores of negative emotions.When individuals make downward social comparison,the score of individual negative emotion is lower.The direction of social comparison has a key impact on the results of individual social comparison.In Experiment 2,no matter whether the correlation between the experimental task and participants is higher or lower,as long as the ranking information that individuals fall behind relative to others will trigger individuals to make upward social comparison.Even under the condition of low correlation between the experimental task and the individual,spontaneous upward social comparison still significantly improves the level of individual negative emotion.This shows that individuals pay strong attention to social comparative information.The results of Experiment 3 showed that when individuals made upward social comparison,the subjects who could conduct self-affirmation responded to a relatively lower level of negative emotion than the subjects who did not conduct self-affirmation.In the social comparison situation of academic achievement,the use of self-affirmation strategy can alleviate the negative impact of upward social comparison on individuals’ emotion.Combined with the above experimental results,the following conclusions are drawn.The direction of social comparison has a significant impact on negative emotions.Compared with the direction of downward social comparison,individuals have a higher level of negative emotion when making upward social comparison.In the social comparison tasks with different degrees of correlation,as long as individuals know the relative performance ranking information that they lag behind others,they will lead individuals to make upward social comparison and improve their negative emotion level.In the context of social comparison of academic achievement,the use of selfaffirmation strategy can alleviate the negative emotions of individuals who have made upward social comparison.