The Study Of Temporal-self Characteristics Among The High School Students From The Explicit And Implicit Perspective

In the study of personality, the self is always the core of research. A good self have crucial role in maintaining mental health and shaping healthy personality. The self is from the past and extended to the future, and not only exist in the now. Attitude towards life events can affect a person’s mental health and well-being. The effect of the attitude towards life events on people is greater than the event itself. Temporal self refer to individuals’ cognition and evaluation of the qualities of one’s past, present and future.In order to study the high school students’ temporal self characteristics, the current study is as high school students participants, aiming to reveal their the temporal self characteristics in the context of Chinese culture. The high school stage is the rapid development period of individual self-consciousness. The self comparison on the time dimension is one of the important way of self-awareness, integrating self-identity. High school students will face to one of the major events in their life——the university entrance exam, and whether they can understand the temporal self fully will affect the achievement of the university entrance exam to a certain extent. So, this study devised two experiments to study the high school students’ temporal self characteristics.The first research is from explicit perspective, employing the self-reference paradigm to examine the high school students’ temporal self characteristics. 41 the high school students evaluated themselves respectively in past, present and future three time dimensions. The measurement results show that, participants evaluated the future self more positive than the past and present self, but the evaluation of the past self and the present self potency differences are not significant.The second research is from the internal perspective, employing the Go/No-go Association Task(GNAT) to examine 40 the high school students’ temporal self characteristics. The measurement results show that, no matter the past self words and present self words, the sensitivity of the association between them and positive traits were significant higher than negative traits. However, in the future self conditions, the sensitivity of the association between the future self words and positive traits and negative traits do not exist between the price effect difference.By examining the high school students’ temporal self characteristics from the explicit and implicit perspective, the following conclusions can be draw:(1)High school students’ overall evaluation on themselves is positive, and they mostly think they are good.(2)The temporal self characteristic of high school students is that, they hold positive past and present self, but the difference is not significant between them, and hold contradictory future self.(3)Explicit and implicit experiment results agree that temporal self-appraisal theory is not applicable in high school students in the context of Chinese culture.