Adolescent Self-worth Protection Strategy, And Related Factors

As an important aspect of psychological diathesis, self-worth has a wide important influence on adolescence's cognition, motivation, affection and social behaviors. Recently problems about self-worth from one's failure have been more and more focused in education psychology field. According to Convington's self-worth theory of motivation, the central part of all students' performance in classroom is the need to protect one's self-worth. The failure holds implications for students' self-worth because failure is interpreted as being indicative of low ability and low ability is equated with a lack of self-worth. Thus, many students go to great lengths to avoid failure or to alter its meaning. Two strategies they can use to do this are self-handicapping and defensive pessimism.At the end of 1970's and the beginning of 1980's, foreign researches about self-protection strategies were begun and gradually lucubrated. Among them, studies about self-handicapping were relatively researched the most, which were mainly about problems of motivation of self-handicapping, influence factors of self-handicapping, and self-handicapping's influence on school performance; but studies about defensive pessimism were fewer. Domestic researchers began to study self-handicapping strategies a few years ago. There are only a few theory and operational studies about self-handicapping; and studies about defensive pessimism are seldom researched. Thus, on the basis of previous studies, this paper places the two self-protection strategies their prediction variables and school performance into a holistic model, by adopting the methods of questionnaire investigation and constructing model; analyzes the developmental trend about self-protection strategies and their relative factors with increasing of grade, and studies gender differences of various variables.The main results and conclusions are as follows: in the holistic model of self-protection strategies, self-efficacy and external attribution significantly predict self-handicapping strategy; performance-orientation, uncertain personal control and external attribution positively predict defensive expectations; uncertain personal control and task-orientation positively predict reflectivity strategy; self-handicapping, defensive expectations and reflectivity strategies all have significant influence on performance. The levels of these strategies rise up with increasing grade; among them, self-handicapping strategy has significant interaction between grades and genders, reflectivity strategies has a significant gender difference. All strategies using by students have the same characteristic in three grades: students use reflective strategy the most, and use self-handicapping strategy the fewest. Various variables of self-protection strategies have grade differences and gender differences.