The Influence Of Social Comparison On Emotion

The topic of social comparison is active in Sociology and Psychology since 1954 when Festinger put it forward until now, that can be attribute to the universality of this phenomenon. Individuals make comparisons with others on his own personality, ideas and behavior to get self evaluation when those are in the lack of objective standard or the objective standard is fuzzy. The process that social comparison makes individual updated on self-consciousness, to a certain extent, determines the individual’s self-concept and expectations for the future. At the same time, individual’s emotional responses to the results of comparison would be the essential factors which can affect mental health.The process of social comparison is very flexible. It can be observed either in natural conditions or in the control of the experiment conditions. After introducing the basic content of social comparison by literature review, in this paper college students were tested using the combined methods of questionnaire and experiment to investigate the different influences on emotion which are aroused by four types of social comparison from different perspective. And the different effect on emotion aroused by different social comparison direction was elaborated. In the last, the model construction of relationship among social comparison orientation, comparative types and the effect of emotion was established, in lean more, the role of core self-evaluation in the relationship was clarified. The results of the study demonstrates:(1) the strategy of upward assimilative social comparison and downward contrastive comparison can get individual’s positive emotions up.(2) the strategy of downward assimilative social comparison and upward contrastive comparison can get individual’s negative emotions up.(3) the type of social comparison is the moderator between the relationship of comparison orientation and emotion when social comparison occurs.(4) both comparison orientation and the type of socail comparison can affect comparison-based emotion, self-evaluation mediated the relationship between them.