A Research On Rural Left-behind Children’ Self-enhancement And Relationship With Its Interpersonal Adjustment

Self-enhancement is the motivation driven individual actively evaluation of their own and feel good about themselves. Self-enhancement is different from other motivations in self-consciousness. In china’s collective socialist cultural background, It Presents the characteristics of interpersonal and concealment, and moderate Self-enhancement is good for one’s health. There are various manifestations involved in Self-enhancement:above-average effect, self-handicapping, self-serving bias attribution, strategic social comparison, selective information processing, etc. Self-enhancement can be measured by narcissism and socially desirable responding, operational mechanism, and implicit self-enhancement method. Lots of factors contribute to the variance of self-enhancement, such as information characteristics, mood, self-esteem and self-concept, social context, and culture.Self-enhancement plays an important role in individual adaptive development. It influences human emotional cognitive health and behavior though various forms. There are lots of arguments about the adaptive value of self-enhancement, meanwhile there is lacked in its domestic empirical study. As the number of rural left-behind children is becoming larger and larger, their mental status turn into a research hotspot, but current study focused on the theoretical aspects, and only few of the researches covered self aspects. Therefore, this study used self-motivation as the breakthrough point, and took questionnaire method, qualitative and quantitative research, exploratory and verification factor analysis, and then discussed the relationship between rural left-behind children and its interpersonal adaptability in theoretical and empirical level.This research included three major parts:connotation structure of rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement formation of measuring tool, the characteristics analysis of rural left-behind children’self-enhancement, and the exploration between rural left-behind children’ self-enhancement and its interpersonal adjustment.In general, the results of this study were as following:1、Rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement had multi-dimensional structure, which constitutes of three main parts including human ascension, talents promotion and extraversion. The edited Self-Enhancement Scale possessed good index of psychometrics and were befitting to the measurement instrument to measure rural left-behind children.2、Rural left-behind children had the tendency of self-enhancement, but the level was lower compared to living-with-parents children, and their general mean of self-enhancement and the mean in each dimension were over the median which was 4 in the scale. And the means of each dimension from higher to lower were extraversion, interpersonal promotion, talent promotion.3、There were grade’s differences of rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement, the means of three different grade period from higher to lower were high school, primary school, junior high school. The gender difference and other external affects (e.g. the educational degree of their parents, their guardian types and their management styles) had no significant influence on their self-enhancement level.4、There was significant correlation between the rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement and their interpersonal adjustment, and there was significant positive correlation between rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement and the level of parent-child cohesion, and its confliction respectively. There was also significant positive correlation between rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement and their peer relationship, and its positive factor respectively. There was significant negative correlation between rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement and the relationship between teachers and students, and its negative factor as well. The level of rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement can predict their condition of interpersonal adjustment in some extent, in which talent promotion played an important role. Talent promotion and interpersonal promotion were predictive index of its degree of parent-child cohesion; talent promotion was the predictive index of parent-children’s confliction frequency and its conflict strength; Talent promotion and extraversion were the predictive indexes of general peer relationships; Interpersonal promotion and extraversion were the predictive indexes of accompany and communication; Talent promotion was the predictive index of affirmation and help; Talent promotion was the predictive index of general teacher-student relationship and its negative factors.In general, this research had some advancements and innovations in two aspects:(1) The study, based on argument of the adaptive value of self-enhancement, chose rural left-behind children as the object of this study to examine the characteristics of individual’s motivation of self-enhancement before his or her self-consciousness turns stable.(2) This research used the methods combining with qualitative and quantitative research, to explore the relationship between rural left-behind children’s self-enhancement as a complicated mental quality and their interpersonal adaptability.