A Study On The Self-schema Of Self-injury College Students

Self-injury behavior has been received extensive attention of the researchers at home and abroad. In recent years, researchers had assessed the self-cognition of self-injury people by questionnaire or interview to investigate personal characteristics of these people while the results are not consistent. In order to help the clinicians really understand the personal characteristics of self-injury people and improve the effect of clinical intervention, it is necessary to explore the self-cognition of self-injury people more comprehensively and deeply, so as to provide the empirical and theoretical basis for the intervention of self-injury behavior.Currently, many researchers have begun to study the self-injury behavior from the perspective of cognitive psychology. According to cognitive psychology, self-schema is the basis of individual’s self-cognition and self-evaluation, and the important internal reason of individual’s personality development. In order to understand the self-cognitive of self-injury people more accurately, the self-schema of undergraduates, who have self-injury behavior, are explored. In this study, self-injury college students from two universities in Wuhan, Hubei Province were selected as the research objects. The research included the following two parts:The first study explored the self-schema of self-injury college students by using the self-reference encoding task (SRET). The SRET results showed that the self-schema of self-injury college students was less positive than the normal college students.(1) The main effects of word types were significant. The amount of recognition of positive interpersonal words was maximum, while the amount of recognition of negative interpersonal words was minimum.(2) The interaction of groups and word types was significant. The control group recognized much more positive interpersonal and personal words than the self-injury group; however, there was no significant difference between these two groups on the amount of recognition of negative interpersonal and personal words.(3) According to the reaction time of choosing "fit", the main effects of word types were significant. The reaction time for control group to choose positive interpersonal words to describe themselves was the shortest, while the negative interpersonal words was the longest; however, the reaction time for self-injury group to choose"fit" to discribe themselves was no significant difference among different types of words.(4) According to the reaction time of choosing "fit", the interaction of groups and word types was significant. The reaction time for control group to choose positive interpersonal and personal words to describe themselves was shorter than the self-injury group; however, there was no significant difference between these two groups on the reaction time of choosing negative interpersonal and personal words to describe themselves.The second study explored the influence of negative emotions on the self-schema of self-injury college students by using the revised Stroop task. Findings revealed that there was no significant difference between negative emotions priming group and control group on the score of positive interference of self as well as negative interference of self.