Parental Psychological Control And College Students’ Coping Styles: A Moderated Mediation Model And Intervention

Coping style is the cognitive behavior style used by individuals when facing frustration or pressure.Individual coping style is an important indicator of individual mental health,which is closely related to individual mental health.Among them,parental psychological control has an important impact on the use of coping styles.Parents’ psychological control has an important impact on their children’s coping styles.As a typical negative parenting behavior,parental psychological control may be an important factor that triggers college students’ emotional focus.Under the high level of parental psychological control,college students in early adulthood may alleviate their parents’ excessive intrusion through learned helplessness and then deal with this situation with emotion as the center.In order to further explore the influence mechanism of parental psychological control on college students’ coping style,this study,based on the interaction theory of coping style,ecosystem theory,learned helplessness theory,self-control and other theories,introduces learned helplessness,self-control variables to explore the impact of parental psychological control on college students’ coping style,and accordingly explores the intervention plan and effect of emotional focus on college students.In the first study,1268 college students were investigated with parental psychological control questionnaire,simple self-control scale,learned helplessness questionnaire and coping style questionnaire to explore the mechanism of parental psychological control on the two coping styles.The results showed that:(1)College students used problem-focused coping rather than emotional aggregation coping.(2)Parents’ psychological control,self-control and learned helplessness of college students have significant differences in gender,and there is no significant difference in gender between the two coping styles.There are significant differences in parental psychological control,self-control,problem-focused coping,and emotion-focused coping among college students in grade,while there is no significant difference in learned helplessness among grades.(3)There is a significant positive correlation between parents’ psychological control,learned helplessness,and emotion-centered coping style,while there is a significant negative correlation between parents’ psychological control,self-control,and problem-centered coping style.(4)Learned helplessness is a complete mediator between parents’ psychological control and emotion-centered coping style;Self-control regulates the first half of the mediation pathway.The second study drew on the self-control training model proposed by the American psychologist Kelly Mc Gonagall to develop a personalized program of self-control training for college students.In the first study,the scores of parents’ psychological control and emotion-centered coping styles were higher than the average,and 12 subjects were willing to continue to participate in this study.A small sample multi-baseline case study method was used to conduct intervention experiments on 12 subjects for a total of 6 weeks in the baseline period,intervention expectation and follow-up period.The results showed that personalized intervention through improving the level of self-control could reduce the individual’s sense of learned helplessness and effectively reduce the individual’s level of emotion-centered coping style.The following conclusions are reached in this study:Coping style is related to the level of parents’ psychological control.College students with high parents’ psychological control level use more emotion focused coping,while college students with low parents’ psychological control level use more problem focused coping.Learned helplessness plays an intermediary role in the relationship between parents’ psychological control and coping styles.Individuals with high levels of parental psychological control have higher levels of learned helplessness,and are easy to adopt more emotional focused responses.Individuals with low level of parental psychological control have lower sense of learned helplessness and are more likely to adopt problem-focused coping.Self-control plays a regulatory role in the relationship between parents’ psychological control and emotional focus.In the low level of self-control,the high level of parental psychological control has a more significant impact on emotional focus.Self-control training intervention can improve individual’s self-control level,reduce individual’s learned helplessness,and then take less emotional focused response,and the intervention is stable.