The Impact Mechanism Of Social Status, Self-esteem And Fear Of Negative Evaluation On Social Anxiety In High School Students

More and more psychologists have been explored the research on social anxiety deeply, yet the studies on high school students are still rare. Moreover, most studies focused on the internal factors of social anxiety, ignoring the effect of external factors. Along with the deepening of research, the significant influence of external factors of social anxiety has drawn more and more theorists’attention. In this study, the external factor (socioeconomic status) and internal factors (subjective social status, self-esteem and fear of negative evaluation) were combined to investigate the mechanism of high school students’social anxiety.The theoretical review and empirical study were included in this paper. In the part of literature review, theory development, measuring method and the related research of the social status, self-esteem, fear of negative evaluation, and social anxiety were combed to provide the basis of the theoretical assumptions. On this basis, the first research exposed the characteristic and relation between socioeconomic status, self-esteem, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety to build the path model of family socioeconomic status, explicit self-esteem, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety among high school students. In the second research, the relationships among implicit self-esteem, socioeconomic status, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety were explored. In order to investigate how does the external factor (socioeconomic status) influence individual’s explicit self-esteem and social anxiety, the third research introduced the subjective social status to find the relation model among socioeconomic status, subjective social status, self-esteem and social anxiety. The findings of this research are put forward to provide the basis for prevention and intervention of high school students’social anxiety.The results indicated:(1) Socioeconomic status is negatively correlated with social anxiety, while positively with explicit self-esteem. There is significant positive correlation between fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety. Then, explicit self-esteem revolved negative relation with fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety.(2)Social anxiety is influenced by family socioeconomic status through the explicit self-esteem and fear of negative evaluation, playing as an intermediary role.(3) There exists implicit self-esteem effect among the high school students, however, the related associations among implicit self-esteem, socioeconomic status, fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety were not significant.(4) Socioeconomic status has a significantly positive relation with subjective social status and explicit self-esteem; and subjective social status is positively correlated with self-esteem, negatively with social anxiety.(5) Subjective social status is playing a significant mediating effect between socioeconomic status and self-esteem. Explicit self-esteem, influenced by socioeconomic status through subjective social status, will affect the level of social anxiety.