Shyness and self-disclosure among college students: the mediating role of psychological security and its gender differen
- PDF / 655,828 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 335 Views
Shyness and self-disclosure among college students: the mediating role of psychological security and its gender difference Liang Li 1,2 & Yingmin Chen 1
&
Zhonghua Liu 1
Accepted: 25 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Self-disclosure, as an important and indispensable behavioral expression in social interaction, refers to the process in which individuals voluntarily expresses their behavior, thought, and feeling when they communicate with others. More importantly, researchers have already proved that self disclosure plays an important role in academic adaptation and personality development of college students. As a very familiar phenomenon in social interaction, shyness refers to the fear, anxiety, and inhibitions in the face of novel social situations, which may hinder individuals’ pursuit of interpersonal relations and thus have a negative impact on the behavior in the process of social interaction, such as self-disclosure. In view of these, this study chooses psychological security (potential affective factor) and gender differences as the two factors to explore the internal mechanism of self disclosure among high-shy students. One thousand and twenty-five college students (290 males and 735 females) completed anonymous questionnaires regarding shyness, self-disclosure, and psychological security. Results indicated that 1) shyness was negatively related to self-disclosure; 2) psychological security mediated the association between shyness and self-disclosure; and 3) the mediating role of psychological security in the relationship between shyness and self-disclosure was not significant in the male sample but was significant in the female sample. These findings demonstrated the contribution of psychological security to the self-disclosure of shy students and provided an empirical basis for the corresponding interventions to promote college students self-disclosure. Keywords Shyness . Self-disclosure . Psychological security . Gender difference . College students
Introduction People engage in a variety of social interactions every day and build a variety of interpersonal relations. Researchers in social psychology have pointed out that social communication and interaction plays a basic but also important role in human daily life, especially for people who want to interact and connect * Yingmin Chen [email protected] Liang Li [email protected] Zhonghua Liu [email protected] 1
School of psychology, Shandong Normal University, Ji’nan 250014, Shandong, China
2
School of psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510000, Guangdong, China
with others in common activities (Jaegher et al. 2010; Snyder and Stukas 1999). Self-disclosure, as an important and indispensable behavioral expression in social interaction, refers to the process in which an individual voluntarily expresses his or her behavior, thought, and feeling when they communicate with others (Fisher 2007; Schug et al. 2010). Self disclosure plays an important role in individuals’ devel
Data Loading...
