The Influence Of Fear Of Negative Evaluation On The Attentional Bias Of Junior High School Students’ Social Exclusion And Acceptance

It is a basic human need that one desires to be accepted and recognized in connection with another person or group.However,perceiving others’negative evaluation will lead to withdrawal and social anxiety.Junior high school students entering adolescence will face great difficulties and challenges in interpersonal communication and physical and mental health after being ostracized by society due to the increase of fear of negative evaluation.The aggregate evidence of some researches in the field of social exclusion seems to show that negative evaluation fear can affect the early perception of interpersonal information under social exclusion,which is manifested as selective attention to different interpersonal information and reflects the individual’s desire and motivation to rebuild social relations after experiencing social exclusion.Whereas,these researches do not involve the adolescent peer group,especially the junior high school students in adolescence.They often show complex and contradictory psychology in interpersonal communication,so it is of great significance to investigate how the level of negative evaluation fear affects the need and motivation of interpersonal communication of junior high school students in different social situations.On the basis of previous researches,in this study,the author attempts to further assume that social acceptance can alleviate individual anxiety and fear from the perspective of social acceptance,and investigates whether junior high school students with different levels of negative appraisal and fear levels have different attentional biases to different types of interpersonal information under social exclusion and acceptance so as to explore some factors that affect the needs and motivations of interpersonal communication of junior high school students in different social situations.This study adopts a mixed design of 2(Social situation:social exclusion,social acceptance)×2(Fear of negative evaluation:high negative evaluation fear,low negative evaluation fear)×3(Emotion type:happy light,angry light,and neutral light).Firstly,30junior high school students with high negative evaluation fear(>1SD)and 30 junior high school students with low negative evaluation fear(<1SD)are screened out by using the concise negative evaluation fear scale.Secondly,they are randomly assigned to either a social acceptance group or a social exclusion group,and they are subjected to social acceptance or social exclusion by an online cyberball game paradigm.Then each participant needs to complete a point detection task with a stimulus presentation time of 500 ms.In this task,happy light pictures are used to represent interpersonal acceptance information,angry light pictures are used to represent interpersonal threat information,and each participant’s attentional bias score for different eyes is measured.Finally,the attentional bias score is analyzed by multivariate repeated measure analysis of variance.Results:The main effect of social situation is significant(F(1,112)=15.92,P<0.01,η_p~2=0.221).After the comparison,it is found that the attention-bias score of the social exclusion group is significantly higher than that of the acceptance group,while the main effect of emotion type and fear of negative evaluation are not significant.The interaction of emotion type*negative evaluation fear*social situation is significant(F(1,112)=4.23,p<0.05,η_p~2=0.087).Further simple effect analysis shows that the fear of negative evaluation not only affects the attentional bias of interpersonal information under social rejection,but also affects the attentional bias of interpersonal information under social acceptance.The details are as follows:1.Under the condition of social exclusion,junior high school students with high negative evaluation fear pay more attention to angry light than happy light,that is,they are alert to angry light.2.Under the condition of social exclusion,junior high school students with low negative evaluation fear pay more attention to happy light than angry light,that is,they are alert to happy light.3.Under the condition of social acceptance,junior high school students with high negative evaluation fear have no significant differences in the attentional bias scores of angry light and happy light,and there is no significant difference in the attention bias scores of angry light under social exclusion and social acceptance,which indicates that they may still invest more attention resources in angry light under social acceptance,but there is no attention alert to angry light,that is,the sensitivity to threatening interpersonal information is greatly reduced.4.Under the condition of social acceptance,junior high school students with low negative evaluation fear have no significant difference in the attentional bias scores of angry light and happy light,and they have attentional avoidance to both happy light and angry light.Conclusion:Junior high school students with high negative evaluation fear give priority to the motivation of self-defense after experiencing social rejection,and social acceptance is likely to help alleviate their anxiety and fear.Junior high school students with low negative evaluation fear consider the motivation of social reconnection under social exclusion,but in social acceptance,they tend to choose to avoid interpersonal information,showing the characteristics of psychological lockdown.This study also provides evidence and ideas for schools and families to carry out emotional health and interpersonal communication education for adolescent junior high school students.