| Parental psychological control mainly involves a range of controlling behaviors on adolescents' ideological and emotional feelings by manipulating and exploiting parent-child bond implemented by parents in disciplining their children,mainly including restricting verbal expression,invalidating feelings and guilt induction.Psychological control has been associated with high levels of mental maladjustment problems,such as anxiety and depressive symptoms.Researchers have suggested that adolescents' self-esteem and emotional regulation play important roles in this association,but the role of adolescent autonomy development and emotional differentiation in this association remain to be explored.Adolescence is a critical period for the realization of self-differentiation,during which individuals pursue independence in thought and emotion,and their self-consciousness develops rapidly.However,excessive parental control on adolescents prevents them from achieving autonomy and developing appropriate emotional response patterns,which has been regarded as a familial risk factor for child social maladjustment.On the basis of self-determination theory and the family system theory,this study investigated the relation between parental psychological control and adolescents' social anxiety,especially the mediating role of adolescents' self-differentiation.We also analyzed how parental psychological control affected adolescents' perception and processing of negative emotions.This study consists of two parts: Firstly,we examined the mediating role of adolescent self-differentiation on the relation of parental psychological control to adolescent social anxiety,and the different mediating roles of the four dimensions of self-differentiation in this association.With convenience sampling method,the Parental Psychological Control questionnaire,the Adolescent Self-differentiation questionnaire and the Social anxiety questionnaire were administered to 422 middle school students.Based on the results from the first part,we further examined the influence of parental psychological control on adolescents' cognitive processing of internal and external emotional information in the second part.On the one hand,a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the influence of parental psychological control on adolescents' acceptance of negative emotions in theirselves.On the other hand,the experiment tasks of emotional word Stroop and emotional face dot-spot task were performed to explore thecharacteristics of the subjects' perception to negative emotional words and face.Results demonstrated that:(1)Parental psychological control was positively associated with adolescent social anxiety,and adolescent self-differentiation played a mediating role in this association.That is,parental psychological control might damage adolescents' self-differentiation,further increasing the risk of social anxiety among teenagers.(2)The effects of various dimensions of adolescent self-differentiation were tested,among which the two dimensions of emotional differentiation(the emotional reactivity and the emotional cutoff)played important mediating roles in the positive correlation between parental psychological control and adolescent social anxiety.(3)Parental psychological control was a positive predictor of adolescent non-acceptance of their negative emotions.That is,when parents implemented higher levels of psychological control in patenting,adolescents were more likely to be at risk for emotional disorders.For example,they might be unable to properly accept their negative emotions in social situations.(4)Parental psychological control affected adolescents' perception of negative emotional words.There were significant differences in the responses to different emotional words for subjects from the high and low parental psychological control group.Adolescents with high parental psychological control tended to pay more attention to negative emotional words.(5)Parental psychological control affected adolescents' perception of negative emotional faces,and there were significant differences in the responses to different emotional faces for subjects from the high and low parental psychological control group.Adolescents with high parental psychological control tended to pay more attention to negative emotional faces,and had a significant attention bias to disgust emotional in the faces. |
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