The Relationship Between Interpersonal Stress、Cognitive Reappraisal And School Adjustment In Senior High School Students

Senior school period is a significant turning point in life and the success or failure of the college entrance examination has an indirect impact on students’ future development, while meanwhile, the school adaptation directly affects their present adaptation and future development. There are plenty of factors that influence senior high school students’ school adaptation, and this study focuses on the effects of interpersonal stress, emotion regulation strategy of cognitive reappraisal, as well as the role of gender on school adaptation. The study, on the one hand, mainly explores the senior school students’ interpersonal pressure and school adaptation from the angle of quantitative analysis, as well as examines the effects of the cognitive reappraisal strategy and the function of gender role. The study, on the other hand, based on conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 students with different academic achievements, and through the theme analyses of qualitative materials, further reveals that the cognitive reappraisal strategy used to enhance the high school students’ cognition can help to avoid the negative effects of interpersonal stress on school adaptation.This study first adopts the quantitative research method to investigate the students of the first and second grades in three Shanghai high schools, and the quantitative results were obtained by means of multivariate analysis of variance,mediation effect and regulation effect analysis etc. The, the further Qualitative results were obtained through semi-structured interviews. Conclusions were summarized as follows:(1) The study variables had the main effects of gender, grade and school type,as well as their interaction effects. Specifically, compared with the female, the male students were far less likely to use cognitive reappraisal strategy and therefore, obviously, they had more behavioral problems, learning problems as well as poorer academic performance. Compared with students of the first grade,students of the second grade adopt more reappraisal strategy, and meanwhile they had more behavioral problems, learning problems but relatively better academicperformance. Compared with the vocational high school students, common senior high school students face more interpersonal stress, more frequently use cognitive reappraisal strategy, and more behavioral problems, but they had less learning problems and better academic performance. Among the vocational high school students, the number of female students of the second grade was relatively more than that of the first grade and they had relatively more behavioral and learning problems compared those female students of the first grade; but the male students of the second grade had significantly better academic performance when compared to the male students of the first grade.(2) Cognitive reappraisal strategy exerts partial mediating effects in the relationship between interpersonal stress and school adaptation. Namely,Interpersonal stress decreased students’ school adaptation but enhanced the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy, and meanwhile, the use of more cognitive reappraisal strategies helped to improve students’ school adaptation. As a result,the cognitive reappraisal strategies reduced the negative effects of international stress on senior high school students’ school adaptation.(3) The mediating effect of cognitive reappraisal strategy in the relationship between interpersonal stress and school adaptation was regulated by gender.Namely, when facing the same interpersonal stress, compared the male, the female students were more adept at using cognitive assessment strategies to maintain good school adaptation.(4) Interview results revealed that students in the group of better academic performance could better utilize the cognitive reappraisal strategy to mitigate interpersonal pressure, and had better school adaptation; and the students in the group of poor academic performance obviously utilize less cognitive reappraisal strategy and had higher interpersonal stress as well as more school adaptation problems.