Psychological Science ›› 2016, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (1): 172-177.

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The Effect of Perceived Social Support on Social Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Rumination and the Moderating Role of Social Undermining

  

  • Received:2015-05-17 Revised:2015-11-16 Online:2016-01-20 Published:2016-01-20

领悟社会支持对社交焦虑的影响:反刍思维的中介作用和社会阻抑的调节作用

宋颖,张守臣   

  1. 哈尔滨师范大学
  • 通讯作者: 张守臣

Abstract: Social anxiety is becoming a worldwide mental health problem and in-service staffs are one of several subgroups most vulnerable to this problem. According to the causality model, the lack of social support can lead to social anxiety. Empirical studies have found that perceived less social support may lead to higher social anxiety. But most of the studies pay more attention to individual factors such as personality to explore the influence mechanism on social anxiety. Far too less attention was paid to the point of interpersonal interaction. Rumination, passively and repetitively dwelling on and questioning negative feelings in response to distress, is a risky factor for the development of psychopathology (Hilt & Pollak, 2012). Social undermining is defined in a work context as behavior intended to hinder, over time, a worker’s ability to establish and maintain positive interpersonal relationships, work-related success, and favorable reputation (Duffy, Ganster & Pagon, 2002). In real life, individuals are affected by both social support and social undermining. Social undermining weakens the role of social support by adding pressures and lowering self-efficacy. The recent study has brought in social undermining and rumination to explore the influential mechanism of the perceived social support on social anxiety and aim to provide the basis for improving and alleviating the extension of social anxiety. Questionnaires are used as methodology to test the hypotheses in this essay. A total of 471 in-service staff (259 males & 212 females), aged from 24 to 55, participated in the study. This study has translated the social undermining scale and used PSSS, RRS, IAS. Bootstrap of Mplus is used as the analytic method to analyze and process the data. The result indicated that: (1) Rumination mediates the relation of perceive social support to social anxiety. Perceived social support predict rumination(β = -.256,P = 0.008) and rumination predicted social anxiety. (2) Social undermining moderate the effect of perceived social support to rumination. The interaction terms(perceived social support x supervisor social undermining) predict the rumination explicitly(β = 0.289, P < 0.001) and the interaction terms (perceived social support x coworker social undermining) also predict a rumination obviously (β = 0.289,P < 0.001). When the levels of social undermining are low, the relation of perceived social support to social anxiety is crucial, while the relation is not crucial with a high social undermining. This study shows a new theoretical and practical view to clarify the social anxiety. It has argued that the findings enrich the causality model by confirming the mediated role of rumination in the relation of perceived social support to social anxiety. This study also confirms that social undermining moderate the impact of perceived social support on rumination. The participants of this study, however, from a variety of professional group, there may be heterogeneous. But this study did not focus on the difference and assume them as homogeneous. More studies should use diverse methods and create diverse models to explore how a professional difference could lead to a difference of the social anxiety.

Key words: social undermining, perceived social support, rumination, social anxiety, social emotion

摘要: 本研究旨在探索领悟社会支持对社交焦虑的影响,深入探讨社会阻抑和反刍思维对该影响的作用。方法:采用问卷法,以471名职员为被试进行调查,数据结果分析采用Bootstrap分析方法。结果显示:(1)反刍思维在领悟社会支持和社交焦虑之间起中介作用。领悟社会支持通过降低反刍思维的水平,降低社交焦虑。 (2)社会阻抑调节领悟社会支持→反刍思维→社交焦虑中介模型的前半路径,社会阻抑改变了领悟社会支持对反刍思维作用的大小。

关键词: 社会阻抑, 领悟社会支持, 反刍思维, 社交焦虑, 社会情绪

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