Research On Teenagers' Self-esteem Structure And Coping Strategies Of Stress

Self-esteem is not only the core ingredient of individual's self-awareness and personality system, but also is the critical variable which affects adolescent's cognition, motivation, emotion, personality and behavioral development, moreover, it plays an important role and significance on the individual's cultural adaptation and mental health maintenance. At present, self-esteem has become one of the hot areas in psychological researches, especially in social psychology and personality psychology.However, since William James proposed the concept of self-esteem in 1890,the controversies on the real essence and structure of self-esteem has never been dropped .In 1990s, Greenwald and Banaji introduced the implicit self-esteem into the field of self-esteem as an important concept of implicit social cognition. Thus, based on the empirical factor analysis, the dual attitudes structure model of self-esteem has been constructed, which created a new research area of self-esteem structure. At present, the dual self-esteem structure and research on relations of interrelated psychological behaviors is the new direction of self-esteem research.Studies have shown that self-esteem as an important personality variable, which is an important content of the psychological development of teenagers. With the psychological development of teenagers,the contents and levels of their self-esteem are expanding and deepening. As we all known that the development of adolescent's self-esteem is inseparable from the social environmental factors and the specific life events factors with which he or she is confront.,For adolescent, how to cope with all situations and which strategies will be chosen in solving increasingly difficulties and everyday events are important factors of the self growth, which should affect the individual's health and personality modeling. Moreover, the self-esteem and coping styles are the intermediary mechanism for individual's socio-cultural adaptation and the regulatory mechanism for psychological and behavioral reaction, it is the concentrated expression of the interaction between individual's personality traits and situational factors as well. On the basis of analysis of dual self-esteem structure, life events factors and coping strategies choice relations, this research wants to explore the performance and features of teenagers' self-esteem dual attitudes structure relationship, coping strategies choice had been taken under stress, thus to provide the theoretical study for self-esteem education and coping counseling skills for teenagers.Based on the questionnaires and the psychological testing techniques, this thesis used Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (SES), Adolescent Self-rating Life Event Checklist (ASLEC), and Coping Style Questionnaire and so on, then used the Inquisit2.0 Millisecond Software to carry out Implicit Association Test (IAT). non-same section students were chosen and tested to analyze the effect of adolescent implicit self-esteem and the relationship between the structure of dual attitudes on the research, through the comparative multivariate analysis on the performance of adolescent's self-esteem structure, social life events and coping styles on the demographic variables, the research sough to discuss the inner relationship and mechanism among the three factors. The results are as follows:1. The effect of implicit self-esteem of teenagers is significant, implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem shows a low correlation between each other, the research verifies the fact that the dual attitudes structure of self-esteem is relatively independent.2. On the multi-dimensions, such as gender, ethnicity, rural-urban disparities, yes or no the only child, section differences, types of parents'work, family economic situation as well as the self-assessment of physical condition, teenagers'explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem appears no significant difference. But on the other dimensions, such as the self-assessment of life satisfaction, academic performance and parental marital status, both show significant differences. All these indicate that social environmental factors and psychological factors have significant influence and efforts on the adolescents'self-esteem structure.3. On the variables of gender and section differences, adolescents'life events factors have significant differences. However, there is no significant difference on the family environment variables; research also shows that there are negative correlations between the dual structure of self-esteem and the life events factors, the negative correlations between explicit self-esteem and life event factors are significant, while there is no significant correlation between the implicit self-esteem and life events factors.4. Teenagers always adopts the coping styles of stress in turns, such as problem solving, helping, fantasy, retreat, self-blame, rationalization, etc. It shows that teenagers mainly use a positive and mature problem-solving-oriented coping strategy, the negative and immature coping strategies are been less used; Following with the age Increasing, the scores of teenagers'coping styles factors have also increased. It also shows that there is negative correlation between implicit self-esteem and negative coping style. And the correlation coefficient is significant on the fantasy factor of coping style, but there are lower correlations between positive coping strategies and implicit self-esteem; while, explicit self-esteem and problem-solving of the coping styles have significantly positive correlation, but with the self-blame of coping style, there is significantly negative correlation, especially there exists a low level of negative correlation with the other factors of coping styles.5. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis shows that the explicit self-esteem and the positive or negative selection orientation of coping strategies have a significant predictive effect. The problem-solving factor of coping strategies has significant negative correlations with the interaction of life events factors and explicit self-esteem. Simple slope tests indicate that self-esteem structure has a regulatory role on individual's choice of coping strategies under the action of life events. On the interaction of life events factors and the positive mature problem-solving-oriented coping strategies the regulating role of explicit self-esteem is significant, while the implicit self-esteem has a significant regulatory role on the interaction of the life events factors and the emotion-oriented coping strategies.