A Study On Parenting Styles Of College Students And The Relationship Between Evaluation Fear And Social Anxiety

Social anxiety has an important impact on the mental health of college students,therefore,it is important for us to explore the influencing factors and formation mechanisms of it.There are many factors that affect social anxiety,including environmental factors and individual cognition.According to previous studies,as environmental factors during the growth of individuals,parenting styles might have an effect on social anxiety by individual cognitive activities such as fear of evaluation,but few studies have explored the relationship among parenting styles,fear of evaluation and social anxiety so far.Furthermore,in the past,many researchers believed that both fear of positive evaluation and fear of negative evaluation were important cognitive components of social anxiety,but there has been lack of examination for the causal relationship between fear of evaluation and social anxiety so far.Based on these,this study first explores the relationship model among parenting styles,fear of positive evaluation,fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety of college students,and then examines the causal relationship between fear of positive evaluation and social anxiety of college students,and the causal relationship between fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety of college students.In the first study,I collected the data from 574 college students by the questionnaire survey,and initially determined the relationship among parenting styles,fear of positive evaluation,fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety.The results show that: The effect of the model fitting is best when the mediating role of fear of positive evaluation and fear of negative evaluation in the relationship among the style of father's emotional warmth,the style of mother's overprotection and social anxiety includes both parallel mediating role and chain mediating role.In the second study,I collected the data from 113 college students by experimental method and explored the causal relationship between fear of positive evaluation and social anxiety of college students and the causal relationship between fear of negative evaluation and social anxiety of college students.The results show that:(1)After the subjects' fear of positive evaluation was induced,their fear of positive evaluation increased significantly,but social anxiety didn't increase significantly;(2)After the subjects' fear of negative evaluation was induced,their fear of negative evaluation increased significantly,and social anxiety increased significantly as well;(3)When the subject's fear of negative evaluation was induced,their fear of positive evaluation also increased significantly.Conclusions:(1)Fear of positive evaluation and fear of negative evaluation play a mediating role between the styles of father's emotional warmth and mother's overprotection and social anxiety,which includes both parallel mediating role and chain mediating role,the results support the view that the relationship between fear of positive evaluation and fear of negative evaluation is the coexistence of the bivalent fear of evaluation model and the delayed model;(2)Individual fear of positive evaluation is partly rooted in the fear of negative evaluation;(3)Fear of negative evaluation can directly lead to individual social anxiety.The results of this study remind us that when formulating strategies to prevent and correct social anxiety of college students,we must take into account the influence of parenting styles on the one hand,and the influence of individual fear for external evaluation on the other hand.