The Influence Of Social Comparison And Self-affirmation On Subjective Well-being Of College Students

Everyone in life is pursuing well-being,and many people regard well-being as the ultimate goal of life.Subjective well-being is a comprehensive index to measure whether a person is well-being or not.It is influenced by many subjective and objective factors.Comparison affects well-being,and social comparison has been proved to be one of the main factors affecting subjective well-being.Social comparison is an individual's behavior of comparing with others,involving many aspects such as ability,viewpoint,character,quality,etc.The comparison results are influenced by many factors such as the comparison object,comparison type,the degree of intimacy between the individual and the comparison object,etc.At present,the conclusions about the influence of social comparison on subjective well-being are not consistent.This study explores the influence of social comparison on subjective well-being by combining comparison objects and the degree of intimacy between individuals and comparison objects.In addition,in order to reduce the negative impact of social comparison,this study introduces self-affirmation to explore whether it can affect the subjective well-being of individuals after comparison.This study consists of the following three parts:(1)Study 1 includes two one-factor between-subject experiments.Social comparison direction is divided into upward comparison and downward comparison.Friends and classmates are taken as comparison objects to explore the influence of social comparison direction on subjective well-being under different comparison objects.The results show that social comparison direction among different comparison objects has different effects on subjective well-being.Social comparison direction among friends has a significant impact on subjective well-being,and the subjective well-being of individuals who compare upward is significantly higher than that of individuals who compare downward.Social comparison direction among classmates has no significant effect on subjective well-being.(2)Study 2 adopts a two-factor between-subject design,which will explore the influence of social comparison direction(upward/downward)and comparison object intimacy(high/moderate/low)on subjective well-being.The study found that the main effect of independent variables was not significant,but the interaction was significant.That is,social comparison direction has different effects on subjective well-being under the condition of different degrees of intimacy between individuals and comparison objects.Under the condition of high intimacy degree,social comparison direction has a significant impact on subjective well-being,and the subjective well-being of the individuals compared upward is significantly higher than that of the individuals compared downward.Social comparison direction has no significant effect on subjective well-being under the conditions of moderate intimacy and low intimacy.In addition,regression analysis found that in the upward comparison,the intimacy of the comparison object had an impact on subjective well-being.The higher the intimacy of the comparison object,the higher the subjective well-being.In the upward comparison and downward comparison,the intimacy of the comparison objects has an impact on the positive emotion.The higher the intimacy of the comparison object,the higher the positive emotion.(3)Study 3 introduces the variable of self-affirmation,and explores the influence of self-affirmation on subjective well-being after social comparison.The results show that self-affirmation has a significant impact on subjective well-being.The subjective well-being of self-affirmation individuals is significantly higher than that of non-self-affirmation individuals.