The Buffer-effect Of Social Identity On Psychological Stress In Different Competition Conditions

Psychological stress occurs when an individual's homeostasis is threatened by psychological stimuli.Stressful life events increase negative affect and risk for depression.Therefore,scholars explore the buffer strategy from different perspectives.In recent years,social identity has been paid more and more attention.Social identity is defined as an individual's self-image from his perceived group,as well as his emotional and value experience as a group member,including cognition,emotion and behavior.When the individual's social identity is salient,the self is defined as a member of a team,whose cognition and attitude of specific events change,so the psychological stress response changes.Some studies have shown that shared social identity can buffer individual's acute psychological stress.However,in previous studies,shared social identity is shaped by the minimal group paradigm,which requires the presence and interaction of others,so the role of social interaction cannot be completely excluded.There are also studies to make the social identity of individuals to their own groups salient through "three things" questionnaire and other forms,which can exclude the role of social interaction,but still no study to explore whether individual stress response will be affected in this case.At the same time,some studies show that social identity does not always buffer stress.When social identity is salient,individuals will strive to establish or maintain a positive social identity to enhance self-identity for the sake of self-esteem,hoping to gain a favorable position when compared with other groups.Therefore,compared with intra group competition,the buffered effect of social identity in inter group competition may be affected.Moreover,referring to the inter-individual-inter-group discontinuity,the individual will have different performance in the inter group competition and intra group competition(prisoner's dilemma),but whether the individual's stress response will have the same performance is not clear.This study aims to explore the buffer-effect of the social identity on the psychological stress response,and whether this effect changes under different competition conditions,and whether the individual stress response will have different manifestations in different conditions of competition.First of all,a pre research is carried out to explore whether the "three questionnaires" social identity priming paradigm can successfully make social identity salient in the context of Chinese culture,and to determine the specific operation in the experiment.Study 1 recruited 60 college students from Southwest China to participate in the experiment,58 of them were effective subjects,which were divided into groups of social identity and personal identity.This paper mainly uses the experimental paradigm of "three questionnaires" to make social identity and personal identity salient,and studies the buffer-effect of social identity on individual stress response based on the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test(PASAT).First,the subjects reported subjective stress as a baseline,and then the social identity and personal identity were made salient through the "three events" questionnaire and making labels.Then,PASAT was used to induce individual psychological stress response,and the two groups finished the same task.The intensity of the stress response was reflected by continuously measuring the physiological response indexes(heart rate,systolic and diastolic blood pressure)of the subjects during this process,as well as the stress feeling in the reporting task(subjective stress report)after the end of the experiment.The results displayed that the variation of heart rate,systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure in the condition of social identity were smaller than those in the condition of personal identity,that is,the psychological stress response was buffered.The Study 2 is completed through the design of the two factor experiment.120 subjects were recruited,119 of them were effective subjects,The two conditions are identity condition(personal identity and social identity)and competition condition(inter group competition and intra group competition).The dependent variables are the physiological response indexes(heart rate,systolic and diastolic blood pressure)and subjective feelings(subjective stress report).The process of the experiment is identical with that of study 1.Different competition instructions are added to PASAT's instructions.The experimental results agree with part of research hypotheses.The heart rate variation of the intragroup competition group was higher than that of the intergroup competition group,that is,the main effect of competition on the dependent variable was significant,while the condition of social identity has no main effect.To be more detail,in the intra group competition,the heart rate variation between the social identity group and the individual identity group is significant,but in the inter group competition condition,the heart rate variation between the two groups is not significant.To sum up,social identity can also buffer psychological stress without social interaction.This kind of buffer-effect fails in the inter group competition,but still exists in the intra group competition.Similarly,there is no case that the individual's stress response is higher than the individual's in group competition,which shows that in the absence of social interaction,the inter group competition cannot make the individual more engaged.This study is conducive to further understanding of social identity play to buffer psychological stress.