The Influence Of Self-aging Attitude On Social Participation Of The Senior People: The Mediating Effect Of Social Self-efficacy

Social participation includes both social interactions and productive activities of individuals in intimate social relationships.Through establishing connections with relatives,friends and the society,as well as participating in social interactions,senior people could meet their own needs,the expectations of the family and the society,and achieve "something for the old".Social participations also increase subjective well-being and lead to a fulfilling life in old age.The self-aging attitude is defined as the old people's positive or negative evaluations of the old people and themselves in the aging process.Self-aging attitude has an important impact on the physical and mental health and behaviors of the elderly.Research have supported the Dual Attitude Model and proposed that implicit and explicit aging attitudes to be psychological structures that are independent from each other(Devine,1989;Greenwald,1995;Wilson,Lindsey& Schooler,2000).Liu & Sang(2010)proposed that implicit attitude and explicit attitude have different powers in predicting different behaviors.The current study recruited the elderly over 60 years old as the research object,and utilized both behavioral experiment and questionnaire survey to explore the influence of the elderly's self-aging attitudes on social participation and the psychological mechanism.In study 1,the relationship between implicit and explicit aging attitudes and the predictive power of implicit aging attitudes on social participation were investigated by using questionnaire and behavior experiment.Twenty-eight subjects completed single category implicit association test(SC-IAT),the attitude toward aging questionnaire,the social self-efficacy questionnaire and the geriatric social participation questionnaire.Results showed that implicit aging attitude was not related to explicit self-aging attitude,and implicit aging attitude was not related to social self-efficacy and social participation.In study 2,questionnaire survey was used to investigate the effect of explicit self-aging attitude on social participation,and the mediating effect betweenexplicit self-aging attitude and social participation.166 subjects completed the attitudes toward aging questionnaire,the social self-efficacy questionnaire and the social participation questionnaire for the elderly.Results showed that the elderly's explicit self-aging attitude could significantly predicted social participation,and the more positive the explicit self-aging attitude was,the higher the level of social participation was.Social self-efficacy mediated the relationship between self-aging attitude and social participation.Overall,findings of the current study indicated that:(1)there is no correlation between implicit and explicit aging attitudes in the elderly;(2)explicit self-aging attitude can positively predict social participation.The more positive explicit self-aging attitude is,the higher the level of social participation will be.(3)social self-efficacy plays a mediating role between explicit aging attitude and social participation.