The Influence Of Social Comparison And Self-affirmation On Junior Middle School Students’ Emotional Experience And Its Educational Enlightenment

Social comparison is a universal social psychological phenomenon in human life,individuals are always passively involved in or actively engaged in some aspects of social comparison.Generally,upward comparison will lower the level of self-evaluation,resulting in negative emotional experience,while downward comparison will improve the level of self-evaluation,resulting in positive emotional experience.In a word,social comparison is the process of comparing an individual with others in terms of ability,opinion,character,quality,etc.,and the result of comparison is affected by factors including the direction of comparison,the object of comparison,or the intimacy between the individual and the object of comparison.As an important psychological resource,positive emotional experience will affect the efficiency of individuals engaged in activities,while negative emotional experience,such as anxiety and depression,will develop into psychological diseases and even cause other problems if allowed to develop.On this basis,it is very meaningful to explore the influence of social comparison direction on emotional experience.According to the self-affirmation theory,self-integrity can be maintained by affirming self-important values unrelated to the threat field,and the threat effect caused by social comparison can be alleviated,so as to integrate more psychological resources for follow-up activities.Therefore,this study also introduced self-affirmation to explore whether it has a positive impact on individual emotional experience after social comparison.In experiment 1,social comparison direction was primed by personage description,and emotional picture evaluation task was used to measure emotional experience.The results showed that: social comparison direction significantly affect emotional experience,under the positive and negative emotions,upward comparison group subjective emotional experience of emotional images score significantly lower than that of downward comparison group,the upward comparison can reduce positive emotional experience,strengthen the negative emotional experience,downward comparison will strengthen the positive emotional experience,reduce negative emotional experience.In experiment 2,interpersonal intimacy scale was used to manipulate the closeness of the comparator,and the influence of social comparison direction on the emotional experience of junior middle school students was investigated.The findings: Social comparison orientation of emotional experience by comparing the influence of the object the adjustment of the intimacy,the high intimate group,significantly affect emotional experience,social comparison direction under positive,neutral,and negative emotion,upward comparison comparison group subjective emotional experience of emotional images score significantly lower than that of downward comparison group,namely high close group of upward comparison to reduce the positive emotional experience,strengthen the negative emotional experience,The high intimacy group increased the positive emotional experience and decreased the negative emotional experience.In the low intimacy group,social comparison direction had no significant effect on emotional experience.In experiment 3,the value choice scale was used to manipulate self-affirmation,and the influence of self-affirmation on emotional experience after social comparison was investigated.The results showed that self-affirmation significantly affected emotional experience.Under positive,neutral and negative emotions,the subjective emotional experience score of the self-affirmation group was significantly lower than that of the non-affirmation group,indicating that self-affirmation can effectively enhance positive emotional experience and reduce negative emotional experience.Conclusions:(1)the direction of social comparison has a significant effect on emotional experience.Upward comparison decreases positive emotional experience and increases negative emotional experience.Downward comparison enhances positive emotional experience and decreases negative emotional experience;(2)Intimacy moderates the effect of social comparison direction on emotional experience.In the high intimacy group,upward comparison decreases positive emotional experience and increases negative emotional experience;downward comparison increases positive emotional experience and decreases negative emotional experience.Social comparison direction had no significant effect on emotional experience in low intimacy group;(3)Self-affirmation can effectively buffer the negative impact of social comparison on emotional experience,improve the positive emotional experience after social comparison,and reduce the negative emotional experience after social comparison.Based on the above research results,the following educational implications are proposed:(1)rational use of social comparison direction,pay attention to the impact of social comparison direction on emotional experience;(2)Select appropriate social comparison objects to reduce the negative impact on emotional experience;(3)The moderating effect of self-worth affirmation strategy on emotional experience.