Adverse Childhood Experiences And Academic Self-handicapping Among Middle School Students:A Moderated Mediation Model

Academic self-handicapping is a defensive strategy adopted to protect self-worth.It means that an individual purposefully creates a real or fictional obstacle,just to have a convincing excuse when the task fails,so as to avoid the negative impact caused by poor self-expression.In the learning situation,because students will always face others’ evaluation of their abilities,they will be more likely to adopt academic self-handicapping strategies for students in middle school.In recent years,the research on academic self-handicapping has attracted the attention of many scholars.However,few studies have been conducted on the impact of remote events and adverse childhood experiences on academic self-handicapping.As a global public health problem,adverse childhood experience will have a serious impact on individual psychology and physiology.Therefore,it is necessary to better explore the impact mechanism of adverse childhood experiences on academic self-handicapping,in order to enrich the research on the mechanism of academic self-handicapping and provide theoretical basis for scientific prevention and intervention.In this study,754 middle school students from two cities in the central region were selected as the subjects,and the data were collected in the form of questionnaire survey,with the effective rate of 93.2%.Starting from the adverse childhood experience,explore the relationship between it and academic self-handicapping,and introduce self-compassion as an intermediary variable,and the current socio-economic status as a moderator to study it.The results show that:(1)Under the condition of controlling age and sex,adverse childhood experiences positively predicted academic self-handicapping;(2)Self-compassion partially mediated this association;(3)This mediating effect was moderated by current socioeconomic status,in that it was stronger for students who were high socioeconomic status than for those who were low socioeconomic status.In summary,this study constructs a moderated mediation model based on life history theory to explore the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and academic self-handicapping,complementing and improving the impact of early environmental factors on academic self-handicapping and its mechanisms,providing a new perspective for our understanding of the emergence of academic self-handicapping.