The Role Of Self-concern In The Social Evaluation Context On The Performance Of Junior High School Students

Shyness refers to the behavior habitation and anxiety in facing novel social interaction situation,which characterized by the fear of negative social evaluation,with behaviorally inhibition and emotionally anxiety as well as physiological responses like blush,fastened heartbeat,breathlessness and other physiological characteristics and negative self-evaluation.Shyness has many negative influence on the psychological development of individual,especially for middle school students who are at the stage of early adolescent.Early adolescents' self-consciousness is developing rapidly.They becomes more concerned about their own performance and place more emphasis on other people's evaluation of them.These features makes this period the peak of the occurance of shyness.Self-focus takes the self as the cognitive object,it is the perception of internal information.Previous studies indicated that the self-focus plays important role on the mechanism of social anxiety symptoms.However,there is a lack of the studies on the mechanism of self-focus on shyness.Exploration on the influence pathway of self-focus on shyness shall benefit the understanding of the mechanism of shyness and offer theoretical support for shyness intervene.Two studies were carried out.Study 1 explored the cognition,emotion and biological reaction features of shy individuals during each stage of social evaluation situation.Results indicated that,compared with non-shy subjects,shy subjects shown(1)higher the task cognitive appraisal and post-event rumination,lower performance expectation,performance evaluation and performance satisfaction;(2)reported higher negative emotion and physiological arousal,(3)shown higher heart rate.The modes of autonomic control of shy subjects was different from non-shy subjects.Study 2 was designed to investigate the role of self-focus on shyness.Four experiments were included.Experiment 1 explored the effects of self-focus on the symptom of shyness of shy and non-shy subjects.subject was asked to make a speech by taking the observer perspective(self-focus condition)and field perspective(control condition).Results indicated that shy subjects show higher level of non-adaptive belief;shy subjects reported higher anxiety and physiological arousal,the reported higher anxiety and physiological arousal of subjects in the self-focus condition was higher than that in the control condition;the speech performance of shy subjects in the self-focus condition was lower than that in the control condition,while non-shy subjects shown no difference.Experiment 2 applied the mental tracking task to investigate effect of self-focus on the interoception sensitivity of shy and non-shy subjects.subjects' interoception sensitivity were measured in the speech expectation condition(self-focus condition)and non speech expectation condition(control condition).Results indicated that(1)the interoception sensitivity in self-focus condition was higher than that in control condition;(2)the interoception sensitivity of shy subjects was higher than that of non-shy subjects.Experiment 3 applied false biofeedback approach to explore the effect of internal physiological cues on the threat perception of shy and non-shy subjects.Results indicated that the threat perception of non-shy subjects in cue condition was higher than that in control condition,while shy subjects threat perceptions shown no significant difference.Experiment 4 was designed to investigate the effect of internal physiological cues on the external attentional bias to social cues of shy and non-shy individuals.The dot probe paradigm was applied.Happy,natural and disgust emotion pictures were used as positive,natural and negative social cues.Pictures of household object were used as non-social cue.Results indicated that(1)the attentional bias to social cues of shy subjects was higher in the cue condition than that in the control condition;(2)the attentional bias to negative social cue of shy subjects was greater than that of non-shy subject.This study draws the following main conclusions:(1)In social evaluation situation,shy individuals hold more negative self-cognition,lower self-confidence,and lower satisfaction for one's own performance,and more negative rumination for performance;shy individuals show higher physiological response and experienced higher physiological arousal and negative emotions;shy individuals show deficits on the regulation of physiological response and emotion.(2)Self-focus can increase the anxiety and physiological arousal.Self-focus has negative effects on shy individuals' behavior performance,whereas it has no significant effect on non-shy individuals' behavior performance.(3)Self-focus can increase the interoception sensitivity.Shy individuals have higher level of interoception sensitivity than non-shy individuals.(4)Internal physiological cues can increase the threat perception of individuals.(5)Internal physiological cues can increase shy individuals' attention to the faces in the external information.Shy individuals pay more attention to negative social cues than non-shy individuals.