Acting Mechanism Of Self-esteem Towards The Relationship Between Peer Attachment And Social Anxiety Of Senior High School Students

Attachment is a kind of psychological structure and thought processes. It is the deep, stable and continuous emotional connection between an individual and others of importance during his growth and development. It can be described as that children are eager to keep close with someone continuously for a long time. The first researches of attachment are mainly aimed at the attachment to mothers from infants, because this is the most significant relationship in children’s early life and one of the most important parts at the beginning of personal social development and life experience. However, later researches have found that attachment is longlasting and it will become the base of the development of individual personality. Therefore, the researches about teenagers’ attachment are attracting more and more attention. Infants often show attachment to their parents, while teenagers to their peers. So the relationship of peer attachment is vital for teenagers’interpersonal communication.It is very popular to look into how the teenagers’relationship of peer attachment influences the social adaptiveness. The attachment theory points out that the quality of attachment will not directly affect children’s social adaptiveness, but between them may be some variable mediator, such as internal working model (Bowlby,1973; Bretherton,1985). The internal working model includes the individual’s thorough awareness of self-esteem and ability, which is formed in the process of interaction between the individual and the dependant. Self-esteem is an important quality in the development of teenagers. The individuals with high self-esteem have high-level self-efficacy, so they will be more confident in social communication and show less social avoidance. Consequently, this research aims to look into how peer attachment influences social anxiety among the senior high school students and whether self-esteem works as mediator.This research adopts the way of measuring the classes, and450high school students in Guangzhou were tested with ECR Chinese version questionnaire, self-esteem questionnaire and social anxiety questionnaire. The main results are as follows:(1) The ECR scale, SES scale and IAS scale have high reliability and validity.(2) Among the types of high school students’ peer attachment, type of fear takes up the largest proportion. Proportion of four types of attachment are as follows:secure20.8%, cool23.5%, concentrated14.9%, fear40.8%. So secure attachment takes up only20.8%, but insecure attachment takes up79.2%.(3) The demographic variables such as gender, professional and grade had no significant difference in the attachment, self-esteem and social anxiety level. (4) The peer attachment characteristics and self-esteem level of senior high school students have prediction effect on social anxiety, and the explanation rate takes up17.7%. Self-esteem level acts as partial variable mediator between attachment avoidance and social anxiety.