Study On Selection Bias Of Social Comparison Object And Its Social Comparison Effect In Depressive Tendency College Students

Depression is a common severe mental disease that that has become an invisible killer threatening human health,and depressive tendency is the early stage of depression,depressive tendency people at high risk of depression.Depressive people generally have distorted views of their self-perception,and negative self-evaluation established from social comparison may lead to or maintain depressive symptoms.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the psychological mechanism of cognitive processing of depressive tendency people from the perspective of social comparison in order to find out the crux and maintenance factors of depression.This study first used a questionnaire survey(Beck Depression Inventory and Self-rating depression scale)method to screen college students with depressive tendency according to the questionnaire criteria.Then through behavioral experiments to investigate the selection bias of social comparison objects of college students with depressive tendency,and finally explore the social comparison effect of college students with depressive tendency.Specifically includes two experimental studies:In the first study,the priming paradigm was mainly adopted,and the depressive tendency group and the normal control group were used as research objects.Under the priming condition of “I’m better than others”and “others are better than me”,the subjects were required to complete the positive and negative judgment tasks of personality trait words,To study whether there is a selection bias in the social comparison object among college students with depressive tendency.It was found that in the reaction time to the part-of-speech judgment,compared with the Upward social comparison(I’m better than others+negative words or others are better than me+positive words),the downward social comparison of the normal group(I’m better than others+positive words or others are better than me+negative words)is shorter.There was no significant difference in the depressive tendency group.On the correct number of part-of-speech judgments,the downward social comparison of the normal group was significantly higher than the upward social comparison.There was no significant difference in the depressive tendency group.In the second study,the priming paradigm was adopted,and the depressive tendency college students were selected as the research subjects.The subjects were randomly assigned to the upward comparison group that was subjected to the upward comparison manipulation and the control group without any comparison.The two groups started the “Now I’m” and “In the future I’ll”.Under the condition,the task of positive and negative judgment of personality traits is completed,and the social comparison effect(Assimilation effect or contrast effect)is measured,that is,the upward comparison produces positive or negative evaluations of the present self and the future self.The results showed that the upward comparison manipulation was successful,and the scores of the upward comparison group on their comprehensive ability were significantly lower than those on the comprehensive ability of others.It shows that the upward comparison may have a contrast effect of threat self-evaluation,which leads to the upward comparison group’s response to the part-ofspeech judgment of the present self is slower than the part-of-speech judgment of the future self.There is no significant difference in the reaction time between the control group’s part-of-speech judgment of the future self and the part-of-speech judgment of the present self.There was no significant difference between the two groups in the correct number of part-of-speech judgments.From these two experiments,This study concluded that:1.Compared with depressive tendency college students,the normal college students prefer to choose downward comparison objects.Normal college students have positive self-positivity bias,and depressive tendency college students’ self-positive bias on social comparison level(Downward comparison object selection tendency)is significantly weakened.2.Most of the depressive tendency college students to have mild or moderate depression.They are not major depression individuals.The depressive tendency in the two groups may not have too negative cognitive bias for the present self and the future self.However,compared with the control group,the upward comparison group may have a contrast effect after the upward comparison,showing that the cognitive processing of the present self is slow.