A Research On Cognitive Appraisal Of Stress In Junior Middle School Students Of Different Sense Of Coherence

The ability of social cognition is one of the important preconditions and sticking points in students' social adaptation. Based on the social cognition paradigm, the author examined junior middle school students' cognitive appraisal on stress. The whole research included the measurement of junior middle school students' sense of coherence (SOC) and three experiments in junior middle school students of different sense of coherence, which aimed to find out features of interpretive bias of stressful situations, the attitude activation to stressful events and the implicit self-percieved coping competence. The dissertation consists of four studies:In the first study, the author measured the sense of coherence (SOC) in 217 junior middle school students by means of random sample. Then according to the score on SOC scale, the top 25% and the tail 25% students divided into two groups (the high score group vs. the low score group) were selected out for the successive studies on the cognitive appaisals of stress. Because of several external reasons, 101 junior middle school students in all took part in the following three experiments.Study 2 focused on interpretive bias, an on-line processing task was adopted to investigate cognitive interpretation of stressful situations in junior middle school students. The result showed that interpretive bias in students of low sense of coherence was significantly more serious than that in students of high sense of coherence, which seemed that students of low sense of coherence did interpret stressful situations in a more threatening way.The goal in study 3 was to explore attitude activation toward stressful events in junior middle school students. The experiment used processing tasks of two different depths—data-drive processing and concept-drive processing to initiate the attitudes to stress. The result showed that generally speaking, junior middle school students' positive cognition and reaction tendency played a more significant role in their cognitive processing of stressful events. Meanwhile, the differences of false alarm ratio caused by different processing manner indicated that implicit attitude toward stress existed in junior middle school students. And grade difference was significant on implicit attitude to stress, the subjects in grade eight hold more positive implicit attitude to stressful events than students of grade nine.In the last study, a computer program was designed to find out the features of implicit self-percieved coping competence in junior middle school students of different sense of coherence according to principle of the Go/No-Go Association Test widely-used in implicit social cognitive research. The results saw significant difference of score on implicit self-percieved coping competence between subjects in two groups after several potential influencing factors (age, grade and gender) were controlled, implying the high sense of coherence students were inclined to believe they were competent implicitly. Moreover, sense of coherence had a predictive effect on implicit self-percieved coping competence. In addition, there were grade difference and gender difference on implicit self-percieved coping competence; subjects in grade nine had a stronger association between self and negative appraisal than eighth grade students, female students hold a stronger association between self and positive appraisal than male students.The research displayed differences on interpretive bias of stressful situations as well as implicit self-percieved coping competence in junior middle school students of different sense of coherence and revealed some of their features of cognitive appraisal on stress. This will help us to know more about the junior middle school students' cognitive processing of social information, enrich related cognitive processing studies of middle school students and have some practical value.