Correlations Between Different Relational-based Social Supports And Emotional Adjustment Among Adolescents

Extensive researches have showed the prediction effects that relationship-based social supports have on individual’s emotional adaptation, for instance, high levels of social support predicted low levels of negative emotions. More researches have found the influences of cognitive and personality factors on individuals’ perceptions of social support, which then show different patterns of effects on individuals’ emotions. Although existing studies have explored and examined the mediating functions of some personal factors, such as personality, self-efficacy and coping skills, few has comprehensively considered the mediation of self-esteem between different relationship-based social supports and adolescents’ emotional adaptation, even few separated analysis on paternal support and maternal support and wether they have same effects on adolescents’ emotional adaptation in the same way through self-esteem.As the monitor of one’s social acceptance and refusal, self-esteem refers to the evaluation on one’s self-value during the process of individual socialization process. Providing with evidence to show that self-esteem served as the mediator between social support and mental healthObjects This study examined the effect patterns between four relationship-based social support and adolescents’emotional adaptation, specially focusing on four relationship-based social support(paternal support, maternal support, peer support and teacher support) and their effect patterns on adolescents’ emotional adaptations, and the mediations of self-esteem underlying the associations. Differences of the above patterns in gender were also analyzed and discussed.Methods The study adopted the Network of Social Support Inventory, Loneliness Scale For Adolescents(revised by Hong Zou), GHQ-20and Rosenberg SES to test1495adolescents (755boys and740girls) from Beijing and Xi’an middle schools(830juniors and665seniors), by using SPSS17.0and Amos7.0to analyze relevant data for the purpose of building a structural equation model to analyze the hypothesis.Results:(1) Social supports could positively predict adolescents’self-esteem; and together with self-esteem, they both could negatively predict adolescents’ loneliness and negative emotions, and positively predict their positive emotions;(2) Social supports could be used to predict adolescents’ emotional adaptation by the mediation effects of self-esteem in different patterns:self-esteem served as a partial mediator between teacher and peer support and adolescents’ loneliness, between maternal and teacher support and adolescents’ negative emotions, and between paternal, teacher, peer supports and positive emotions; self-esteem served as a complete mediator between both paternal and maternal supports and adolescents’ loneliness, between paternal, peer supports and adolescents’ negative emotions, and between maternal support and adolescents’ positive emotions;(3) The effect patterns of four relationship-based social supports and adolescents’ self-esteem and loneliness showed significant differences in gender:for boys, teacher support had no significant prediction effect on their self-esteem; for girls, paternal support had no significant prediction on their self-esteem;the other path analysis results remained same with the loneliness model for the whole participants.It showed no significant gender differences in the effect patterns of social support,self-esteem and adolescents’ positive/negative emotions.It can be concluded that social supports from different relationships have effects on adolescents’emotional adaptations through self-esteem in different ways, which also appeared gender differences in the loneliness model.