The Development Of Children 's Medium - Term Social Anxiety, Adaptation Function And Its Mechanism

Social anxiety in children usually refers to be nervous and anxious and constantly when a child is in the situation strangers around or he/she needs to socially interact with others. Therefore, socially anxious children avoid such situations because they are afraid of being judged. The symptoms of social anxiety usually occur in childhood, and would be worse when socially anxious children enter in adolescence or adulthood. Once Social Anxiety symptoms transferred into Social Anxiety Disorder(SAD), there would be a lot of bad effects on patients’ work, studies and lives. Moreover, childhood is the critical period of the development of children’s physiology and psychology. Social anxiety is associated with age, gender and parenting of children, and socially-anxious children often have maladjustments.Coping strategies refers to the coping styles and strategies a person usually use when he/she is faced with stressful events. It is said that socially anxious children were prone to use emotion-focused coping. A few researches showed that,emotion-focused coping is related to the results of maladjustments, such as peer refuse and reject, weariness of learning, playing truant from school, and academic decline. Therefore, the use of emotion-coping strategy may be the mediation of social anxietyand adjustments. The present study mainly explored the development of social anxiety in children, the adjustments of socially-anxious children and the internal mechanism of the relationships among social anxiety, adjustments and emotion-coping strategy.The present study consisted of three researches used the questionnaire survey method. These researches were independent and interrelated with each other. 1485 students from Grade3-8 were investigated in the Research 1.Social Anxiety Scale for Children-Revised(SASCR) and Parenting Scales were used to explore the development of social anxiety and the relationship between social anxiety and parenting. Then, 991 children aged 8-9 years old were investigated in Research 2. It was an one-year longitudinal study. Children filled the Social Anxiety Scale for Children-Revised(SASCR), the Children’s Depression Inventory(CDI) and peer nominations during they are 8-9 years old. At the same time, teachers filled the Teacher–Child Rating Scale(TCRC). A year later, children and teachers were asked to fill these questionnaires to explore the predictive relationships among socialanxiety and adjustments. 594 students were investigated to explore the mediation of emotion-focused coping strategy between social anxiety and adjustments in Research 3,Children filled the Social Anxiety Scale for Children-Revised(SASCR),the Children’s Depression Inventory(CDI), the Self-Report Coping Scale(SRCS), and peer nominations. At the same time, teachers filled the Teacher–Child Rating Scale(TCRC).Through the analysis of variance,cross lagged analysis and mediation analysis,the results indicated that:(1) Social anxiety had gender difference and no grade difference in the cross sectional studies, girls reported more symptoms of social anxiety than boys.Children had lower level of social anxiety as they entered higher grade. At Time 1, there was no grade difference in social anxiety. At Time 2, social anxiety of grade 5 is higher than grade 4. At the same time, social anxiety had an interaction of grade and gender. As the grade rises, there were no grade differences in social anxiety for boys, but higher grade of girls were more socially-anxious.(2) Parenting predicted the social anxiety levels of children, authoritative parenting was protective factor for socially-anxious children, but psychological control parenting and authoritarian parenting were risk factors.(3) There were gender differences in children’s adjustments. Girls scored higher in peer preference and school competence than boys. But boys scored higher in depression than girls. Moreover, socially-anxious children had more maladjustments. They scored lowerpeer preference, higher depression and lower school competence than other children.(4) There were causal relationships between social anxiety and depression, social anxiety and school competence, but no between social anxiety and peer preference. T1 peer preference predicted T2 social anxiety, but the reverse relationship didn’t exist.(5) The emotion-coping strategy played part of mediating roles between social anxiety and depression, social anxiety and school competence. The mediation effects were both 48%. And the emotion-coping strategy played a completed mediating role between social anxiety and peer preference.