The Study Of Worry In Middle-School Students:General Vulnerability VS. Content Specificity

Worry, is quite a common process to most individuals, but there hasn't been a wealth of domestic research around it in deep. Based on the review of theory elaboration and models that have been advanced to explain worry, the author examined the characteristics of middle-school students' worry as well as the difference of their cognitive processing related to worry. In addition, the study also explored middle-school students' state worry and cognitive appraisal in different situations. The whole study included the measurement of middle-school students' worry tendencies, and four experiments in middle-school students with different worry tendencies, which aimed to find out characteristics of worry (general vulnerability VS. content specificity) in middles-school students, features of their attentional bias and tendencies of importance appraisal, as well as their state worry and cognitive appraisal in different situations. The dissertation consists of five studies:In the first study, the author measured the general worry tendencies in1010middle-school students by means of random sample. Then according to the scores on Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), the top25%and the tail25%students divided into two groups (the high score group vs. the low score group) were selected out for the successive studies on their worry.Study2focused on the characteristics of middle-school students' worry, a technique of worry induction named attention-focus task was adopted to investigate if middle-school students' worry represented as a kind of general vulnerability of worry to stressful events or as a kind of content specificity of worry. The result showed that high-tendency worriers experienced less control over negative intrusive thoughts than low-tendency worriers under quiet situation. But after worry induction, the effect on the control over negative intrusive thoughts by different contents of worry induction would change as time went by in different group of students with high-and low-worry tendencies. In addition, contents of worry influencing on the success of students' attention-focus task would change as time went by. Results suggested that worry content may be one of the important factors that would cause the change of worry characteristics in middle-school students.In use of the dot probe task commonly used in research of attentional bias, the first experiment in study3also explored the attentional bias to general threat stimulus and threat stimulus related to school work in middle-school students with different worry tendencies. The result showed that high-tendency worriers would have more cognitive processing on threat stimulus regardless of their type, and their attentional bias represented as difficulty in disengaging from threat stimulus. Results suggested that middle-school students showed general attentional bias to threat-related stimulus independent on the type of threat.In the second experiment in study3, a computer program was designed to find out the tendency difference of importance appraisal on school events in students of different worry tendencies according to principle of the Go/No-Go Association Test widely-used in implicit social cognitive research. The results saw significant difference of tendency in importance appraisal among students in several grades, implying students in grade7were more inclined to make important appraisal on school work events compared to students in grade10and students in grade8were more inclined to make important appraisal on school work events compared to students in senior middle-school. But difference in tendency of importance appraisal were not found in students with different worry tendencies.In the last study, the experiment was to investigate middle-school students' state worry and features of their cognitive appraisal under true competition and cooperation stress situations. Test of between-subjects effects suggested that boys' sense of control on both situations was higher than girls' with an exception of that boys in grade7experienced less control on competition situation than girls in grade7. Moreover, with respect to situation types, they couldn't imply difference of the threat appraisal and sense of control on situations of students with different worry tendencies. But these two groups of students did show difference of state worry under competition and cooperation stress situation. Specifically, the state worry of high-tendency worriers in cooperation situation was higher than that in competition situation; but there weren't difference of state worry of low-tendency worriers between competition and cooperation situations.In sum, the results stated above implicated worry in middle-school students was more inclined to be affected by worry content and outside situations. With respect to cognitive processing, high-tendency worriers would have more cognitive processing on threat stimulus regardless of their type, and their attentional bias represented as difficulty in disengaging from threat stimulus. This will help us to know more about the characteristics of worry in middle-school students, enrich related worry process studies of middle-school students and have some practical value.