An Experiment Research On The Effectiveness Of Different Strategies Of Self-affirmation To Deal With Study Crisis

In reality, people will inevitably encounter failure and frustration, and these will be threat-ening to individuals’ positive images. People will take defensive reaction to deal with this situ-ation, which is not conducive to personal growth. However, Steel proposed that self-affirmation can reduce defensive reaction to these people threatening information. Self-affirmation is a strategy that restoring the integrity of the individual, that individual is generally good, adapt to the community by affirming the different areas of the threatening area. An important area of the application of self-affirmation is self-affirmation as an effective response to the academic crisis, by self-affirmation, people restore their confidence after the crisis.In China, there is no research on the aspect of self-affirmation to deal with academic crisis. But in the abroad study has proved that individuals can recover from setbacks, and the anti-self-affirmation effect did not occur if self-affirmation is conscious and freely chosen. Western tend to use independent self-affirmation while Chinese tend to independent and interdependent self-affirmation. So, whether Chinese undergraduates can conscious use self-affirmation as a strategy to deal with academic crisis? And whether the characteristics of Chinese of self-affirmation could affect the effect? In order to answer the two questions, I designed two Studies.In Study1, the105Chinese undergraduates were randomly assigned to five groups, the standard group of independent, the freely-independence group, the control group, the standard interdependent and the freely-independent. In the Study, all participants firstly read a little essay, and then ranked the value, followed by the corresponding self-affirmation manipulation. At last, participants completed different two mathematical tests, but only took the second test scores as the study variables. The result is that the scores of the control group is significantly lower than other groups, and the differences of the other four groups are not significant.The Study2is designed to research whether the participants with the different major self-worth could influence the self-affirmation as a strategy to the academic crisis. In the Study,84undergraduates were tested to determine the relative importance of the two types of self-worth in the form of scales, then completed the same experimental procedure of Study1. But in the Study 2, participants read an article about the self-affirmation effect and choose self-affirmation mani-pulation freely. After the Study, participants were assigned to three groups, independent-worth group, mix-worth group and interdependent-worth group, by the score of the difference of the two parts of the self-worth scale, to research the effects of self-affirmation strategy differences in these three groups. The results showed that the interdependent strategy is significantly better than the independent strategy and participants of different self-worth use the self-affirmation strategy will get different effect.Based on the two Study, we obtain the following conclusions:(1) Self-affirmation can be used as a consciously and freely chose strategy to deal with Chinese undergraduates’academic crisis;(2) The interdependent strategy can be applied to different self-worth people to cope with academic crisis;(3) The Independent strategy can only efficiently applied to Independent-worth people to cope with academic crisis.