The Influence Of Family Environment On Middle School Students’ Emotional Adjustment:the Role Of Life History Strategies And Resource Control Strategies

Family environment,is a micro environmental directly related to individual development,which has a profound and lasting influence on individual emotional adaptation.Emotional adjustment,as one of the connotations of social adjustment,is the result of the interaction between the individual and the environment.From the perspective of evolutionary psychology,the environment influences the generation of individual life history strategies,and individuals dynamically take resource control strategies to adapt to the environment.Combining life history theory and resource control theory,this study examines the emotional adjustment of middle school students and the mechanisms of influence of family environment emotional adjustment through longitudinal tracing,mainly including the longitudinal predictive role of resource control strategies and emotional adjustment,and the longitudinal mediating role of life history strategies and resource control strategies between family environment and emotional adjustment.By means of class whole-group sampling,551 first-year students who had just entered school were used as participants.The Family Socioeconomic Status Questionnaire,Parenting Style Scale,and Early Life Environmental Unpredictability Scale were used as measures of family environment;the UCLA Loneliness Self-Rating Scale and the Flow Center Depression Scale were used to examine emotional adjustment;and the Mini-K Scale and Resource Control Strategies Scale were used to examine middle school students’ life history strategies and resource control strategies.The three data collections were conducted in January 2022(T1),July 2022(T2),and January 2023(T3).Descriptive statistics and t-test were performed using SPSS 26.0;cross-lagged regression analysis and mediating effects analysis were performed using Mplus 7.4.The findings revealed that:(1)Middle school students’ emotional adjustment was good overall,and the levels of loneliness and depression showed a decreasing trend over time.(2)Middle school students’ scores of coercive strategy showed a decreasing trend and pro-social strategies showed an increasing trend over time(3)Cross-lagged tests found that all resource control strategies in the previous stage significantly predicted emotional adjustment in the later stage,and the cross-lagged regression analysis of pro-social strategy on depression was not significant.(4)The longitudinal mediation model indicated that life history strategies and resource control strategies played a serial mediation role between family environment and loneliness and depression.Particularly,family socioeconomic status and parenting style both directly and negatively predicted loneliness and depression,and also negatively predicted middle school students’ loneliness and depression through the separate effects of life history strategies and the partial serial mediation of life history strategies and coercive strategy;environmental unpredictability both directly and positively predicted loneliness and depression,and also predicted middle school students’ loneliness and depression through the separate effects of life history and the full serial mediation of life history strategies and coercive strategy,middle school students’ depression through the separate effects of life history and the partial sequence mediated effects of life history and coercive strategy.The research results explored the dynamic development trend of loneliness and depression of junior high school students,verified the longitudinal prediction effect of resource control strategies on loneliness and depression,and revealed the mechanism of "family environment→life history strategy→resource control strategy→emotional adaptation",which has certain reference value for improving the mental health of junior high school students.