School Students' Self-esteem And Its Related Factors

Self-esteem is individuals' global emotional evaluation and experience of the value and function of their own, which is based on self-evaluation. And it is one of the central components of self system. The level of self-esteem not only is directly related to adolescents' mental health but also play an important role in adolescents' development of personality and behavior. At the same time, serving as one of the personality variables, self-esteem has comprehensive effects on adolescents' cognition, motivation, emotion and social behavior.With three self-esteem scales which are in most common use and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) developed in these recent years serving as the main research tools, this research studied the developmental characteristics of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem of students learning in Gongdu schools, the difference between Gongdu school students' developmental characteristics of self-esteem and those of normal junior high school students, the factors which influenced Gongdu school students' development of self-esteem, the relationship between their explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem, and its influence on Gongdu school students' mental health, etc. The results indicated that:1. Gongdu school students' level of explicit self-esteem was generally lower than that of normal junior high school students in the first and the second year, but the third year was an exception. The reason for that was normal junior high school students' significant descending of explicit self-esteem in the third year. Nevertheless, Gongdu school students' level of implicit self-esteem was not lower even higher than that of normal junior high school students;2. On the whole, no significant grade or age difference existed in Gongdu school students' development of explicit self-esteem, except that the second year students had significantly higher explicit self-esteem than the first year students, which perhaps was related to their gradual reduction of pretension. With the age increasing, normal junior high school students' explicit self-esteem had a significant descending trend. The third year students' level of explicit self-esteem was significantly lower than that of the first and the second year students;3. There existed significant correlation between Gongdu school students' explicit self-esteem and the parenting style they perceived. There was significant negative correlation between their explicit self-esteem and their parents' "punishment and firm control", "excessive interference", "rejection and negating " and "excessive protection". There existed significant positive correlation between their explicit self-esteem and their parents' "favoritism" and "emotional warmth and understanding ". There also existed significant negative correlation between Gongdu school students' explicit self-esteem and their stress level caused by negative life events. The higher their stress level was, the lower their self-esteem was. And Gongdu school students' stress level caused by life events was significantly higher than that of normal junior high school students. However, the stress caused by negative life events had no significant impact on their implicit self-esteem.4. There existed very significant correlation between Gongdu school students' explicit self-esteem and their state anxiety, trait anxiety, depression and other indices of mental health, which implied that the development of self-esteem was one of the important factors that influenced Gongdu school students' mental health. However, Gongdu school students' implicit self-esteem itself was not significantly correlated to their indexes of mental health.5. Gongdu school students' explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem were two relatively dependent self-evaluation systems. Gongdu school students' and normal junior high school students' combining ways of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem were different. For the former, their implicit self-esteem was higher than their explicit self-esteem. For the latter, t...