Studies Of The Relationship Between The Implicit-explicit Self-esteem And Mental Health Among Boarding School Students

Secondary school is the key stage for developing the individual’s physical, psychological and social behavioral aspects. At this stage, high school students’ self-awareness starts to flourish and exerts huge impacts on their mental health. Self-esteem, as the core, is a rather important factor. With the deepening research of implicit social cognition as well as the improvement in the techniques of measuring implicit cognition, implicit self-esteem has gradually become one of the focuses among those related researches. Based on the actual situations of boarding secondary schools in minority area in Qinghai Province, we studied the students’ implicit self-esteem, explicit self-esteem and mental health, which could provide a new reference for the counseling and intervention for boarding school students and could also be meaningful for mental-health education. Taking the boarding school students in Huangnan as subjects, this study, on the basis of recent domestic and foreign research, firstly utilized Mental Health Test, Adolescent Life Event Scale, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Primary and Secondary Esteem Rating Scale and the self-programmed associating tests for implicit self-esteem to survey their implicit, explicit self-esteem and mental health status. Moreover, it verified the structure of self-esteem proposed in the carried-out studies. Lastly, the relationships among self-esteem, life events and mental health were also studied. Through the studies above, it could be found that among the groups of boarding school students: 1. There exist implicit self-esteem effects; 2. The level of implicit self-esteem remains relatively low; 3. Implicit self-esteem and explicit one are two relatively independent structure; 4. Boarding school students’ explicit self-esteem, adolescent life events are significantly associated with mental health, also they are a good predictor for mental health.