Emotional Self-schema And Attention Bias For Emotional Information Of People With Different Sense Of Coherence

Sense of coherence is a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence,comprising three components comprehensibility manageability meaningfulness. Sense of coherence is closely related to mental health. It is an improtent resource to cope with stress. However, the protection mechanism of the sense of coherence is as yet unknown at present and there is rare correlative study. This study discusses the characteristics of the processe of emotional information between different level of sense of coherence, trying to explore mechanism of sense of coherence preliminaryly.During the study, a large number of middle school students completed the13-item short version of the Orientation to Life Questionnaire (SOC-13). Some of the students were screened for the formal experiment. The present study consisted of two parts:Part1:In order to investigate the characteristic of emotional self-schema between different level sense of coherence, there were56subjects (HSoc27, Lsoc29) to complete SRET(self-referent encoding task). The stimulat materials were comprised of positive emotional worsd and negative emotional wors.The results revealed that (a) High sense of coherence participants recognized more positive emotional words than low sense of coherence participants, while low sense of coherence participants recognized more negative emotional words than high sense of coherence participants.(b) High sense of coherence participants reacted more quickly to positive emotional words than low sense of coherence participants.(c) Different level of sense of coherence participants did not appeared to have processing advantage on self-related emotional information in the amount of recognition an reaction time.Part2:In order to investigate the characteristic of attention bias between different level sense of coherence, there were56subjects (HSoc27, Lsoc29) to complete cue-target task. The stimulat materials were comprised of positive emotional words, negative emotional words and neutral words. The results revealed that (1)High sense of coherence participants reacted more quickly to positive emotional words than negative emotional words when the vaild clues were given. Attention bias to positive emotional words was found in the high sense of coherence participants and they were vigilant to positive emotional words.(b)High sense of coherence participants reacted more quickly to positive emotional words than negative emotional words when the invaild clues were given. Attention bias to positive emotional words was found in the low sense of coherence participants as well and they showed attentional avoidance to positive emotional words.Main conclusions of this study were:(1)Different level of sense of coherence individuals have different emotional self-schemas.High sense of coherence individuals have a positive emotional self-schema and low sense of coherence ones have a negative emotional self-schema.(2) Different level of sense of coherence individuals who are still in their adolescence have different emotional self-schemas, but these emotional self-schemas have not been fully developed yet.(3) High sense of coherence individuals were vigilant to positive emotional words, and low sense of coherence ones showed attentional avoidance to positive emotional words. Attention bias to positive emotional informations is an important cognitive mechanism of coping with stress for differnent level of sense of coherence individuals.