The Influence Of College Students' Sense Of Power On Loneliness

Human beings are social animals,and their social relations with others have an important impact on the physical and mental health of individuals.Loneliness is often an unpleasant and painful experience,and prolonged loneliness can also damage an individual's mental health.Nowadays,with the development of information network technology,the way people communicate and interact has undergone a fundamental change.More and more people are immersed in the online world,and have less in-depth communication with people in real life,so they experience more loneliness.College students,in particular,have a higher risk of loneliness than other groups due to their lack of social experience while studying and living alone in a strange micro-society.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to adopt scientific research methods to investigate the occurrence mechanism of loneliness among college students,so as to find specific measures to effectively reduce the loneliness of college students and improve their mental health.The sense of power is defined as an individual's perceived ability to control or influence another person or group of people.Based on the summary and review of previous studies,some scholars pointed out that the sense of power may be an important factor affecting loneliness.According to the power proximity/inhibition theory,people with a high sense of power tend to view their environment as rewarding and have more positive perceptions.Research has found that the higher the sense of power,the more connected individuals feel to others.There are also studies that directly reveal the influence of the sense of power on loneliness by taking American residents as subjects.On this basis,this study discusses for the first time the influence of power on loneliness of Chinese college students,in order to test the cross-cultural stability of the influence of power on loneliness.Unmet need for belonging refers to the extent to which an individual's belonging need is not satisfied.It is found that although the correlation between belonging need and loneliness is weak,there is a strong positive correlation between unmet need for belonging and loneliness.Research on the sense of power has also found that the sense of power leads to a positive perception of relationships,which means that the individual's need to belong is well satisfied.Accordingly,this study took the unmet need for belonging as the mediating variable,and attempted to explore the specific mechanism of the influence of the sense of power on loneliness.Self-construction refers to the tendency of individuals to put themselves in the reference systemwhen they know themselves,including independent self-construction and dependent self-construction.A large number of previous studies have found that interdependent self-construction can promote individuals to obtain better interpersonal relationships.Therefore,compared with independent self-construction,dependent construction is more likely to weaken the negative influence of power on loneliness.Therefore,this study takes self-construction as a moderating variable,and tries to explore the boundary conditions of the influence of power on loneliness.This study consists of three sub-studies: study 1 is a questionnaire survey,using the general power scale and UCLA loneliness scale for random measurement,a total of 369 effective questionnaires were recovered,and the negative correlation between the sense of power and loneliness was preliminarily explored.The second study,which included preliminary and formal experiments,mainly aimed to verify the mediating role of unmet need for belonging in the relationship between the sense of power and loneliness.In the pre-experiment,the participants' high and low sense of power was activated by role imagination,and the inter-group design of single factor2 level(high sense of power VS low sense of power)was adopted.A total of 76 subjects participated in the experiment,and the influence of high and low sense of power on loneliness was revealed by experiment.The formal experiment adopted the effective manipulation paradigm in the preliminary experiment,and used the self-rating scale to measure the mediating variable of unmet need for belonging,and expanded the number of subjects to 197 in total,so as to verify the mediating effect of unmet need for belonging between the sense of power and the sense of loneliness.In the third study,the variable of self-construction type is introduced to explore whether different types of self-construction and different levels of sense of power have interactive effects on individual loneliness,that is,whether self-construction can play a regulating role.In study 3,subjects' sense of power was activated by recall method,and different types of self-construction were activated by instruction language.The inter-subject design of 2(high sense of power VS low sense of power)× 2(independent self-construction VS dependent self-construction)was adopted,and a total of 113 valid subjects' data were collected.Through the above research process,the following three conclusions are finally drawn:(1)loneliness is negatively predicted by the sense of power.The loneliness of individuals with low sense of power is higher than that of individuals with high sense of power.(2)unmet need for belonging plays a complete mediating role between the sense of power and the sense of loneliness.The sense of power affects the level of loneliness by affecting the individual's unmet need for belonging.(3)self-constructed type can significantly regulate the relationship between the sense ofpower and loneliness.When the individual is activated by the interdependent self-construction,the degree of the sense of power no longer has a significant influence on the level of loneliness he experiences.However,when individuals are activated to independent self-construction,the sense of power still exerts a significant negative influence on the loneliness they experience.