Effects Of Implicit Self-Esteem And Implicit Self-accepiance Trainings On Negative Evaluation Sensitivities Of High Social Anxious Individuals

Social anxiety refers to the phenomenon that individuals have a strong emotional reaction of anxiety,nervousness or fear and avoidance behavior to a certain or a variety of interpersonal situations.Previous studies have shown that social anxiety not only affects people’s normal life,but also reduces individual happiness and leads to adverse effects such as alcoholism.Cross-literature research shows that 11.5%-25.5%of Chinese college students have social anxiety problems.Fear of negative evaluation is the core feature of social anxiety.According to the cognitive model of social anxiety,when there is a big difference between the expected behavioral representation and the expected evaluation criteria in the social evaluation system,the possibility of individuals anticipating that they will receive negative evaluation is greater,and the anxiety symptoms will be more obvious.The behavior expectation of people with social anxiety will underestimate or even "vilify" their possible behaviors,believing that they are not good enough.This low self-evaluation corresponds to "low self-esteem" in the individual self-evaluation system.In addition,people with social anxiety will set themselves a rigid and strict behavior standard.This harsh social self-evaluation standard corresponds to the"low self-acceptance" in the individual self-evaluation system.The question that this research focuses on is whether changing the individual’s self-evaluation system can change its sensitivity to negative reviews.The subjects of this study are college students with high social anxiety.Implicit self-esteem enhancement training and implicit self-acceptance enhancement training were used to reduce the sensitivity of social anxiety students to negative evaluation,and the effects of the two methods were compared.In this study,a 2(test time:pre-test,post-test)×4(intervention method:implicit self-esteem training,implicit self-acceptance training,positive feedback-independent training,and neutral feedback-independent training)two-factor mixed experimental design was adopted.Intervention was between-subject variables,and subjects were randomly selected into four training groups.The test time was within-subject variables,before and after the intervention,all subjects received measures of implicit self-esteem,implicit self-acceptance,and sensitivity to negative evaluation.The results showed that:(1)After implicit self-esteem enhancement training,the implicit self-esteem of college students with high social anxiety was significantly improved,and their sensitivity to negative evaluation was significantly reduced.(2)After implicit self-acceptance training,college students with high social anxiety have significantly improved their implicit self-acceptance and significantly reduced their sensitivity to negative evaluations.(3)There is no significant difference between the two training methods in reducing the sensitivity of high social anxiety college students to negative evaluations.This study demonstrates that changing the self-evaluation system(self-esteem and self-acceptance)can affect the sensitivity of individuals with high social anxiety to negative evaluations.These results refine the interaction mechanism between social anxiety and fear of negative evaluation,build a bridge between the anticipatory others’ evaluation system and the self-evaluation system,and expand the cognitive behavior model of social anxiety.More importantly,this study found that implicit self-esteem and implicit self-acceptance training significantly improved the fear of negative evaluation among social anxious people.This method provides a new way of thinking for the prevention and intervention of social anxiety and has a positive practical value.