| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 92 === Although it''s now clear that perceived support availability predicts better adjustment to stressful events, actual support transactions, however, has failed to exhibit such protective effects. Trying to explain why actual family support transactions appear to be ineffective in reducing emotional distress, the current research suggested two possibilities. One is that parents'' well-intentioned efforts may fail to be helpful, when parental emotional over-involvement（Coyne, Wortman, & Lehman, 1988）happens. The other is that zero-order correlations are prone to confound opposite support effects, which could be moderated by parent-child relationship intimacy.
This study utilized a test-retest design with 221 parent-child dyads, and measured actual provided and received family support, parental emotional over-involvement, test anxiety and test depression, as well as parent-child relationship intimacy, during the high-stress one week period before the end-of-term examiniation.
As the results revealed, first of all, the superficial ineffective link of actual family support transactions in reducing emotional distress was reconfirmed on raw data level, as well as latent variable level. Next, two-way ANOVA showed that the interaction of support provision and receipt was significant. Among the four support configurations, “high provision, low receipt” was indeed the worst in reducing distress, an important result for further excluding the competing hypothesis of self-esteem cost（Bolger, Zuckerman, & Kessler, 2000）, the representative western explanation in correlational research. In addition, SEM demonstrated that the effects of actual family support in reducing emotional distress were fully mediated by low parental emotional over-involvement. Finally, all parent-child pairs were divided into three intimacy groups: the remote, average, and intimate groups. Multiple regression analyses suggested that effects of actual provided family support were significantly different between average versus intimate group on reducing test anxiety. The link of parental emotional over-involvement to test anxiety was slightly moderated by relationship intimacy, while the link to test depression, however, was moderated in an opposite way. The author offered explanations in those results contradicting previous research hypotheses.
All in all, the current study theorectically and empirically explained why actual family support transactions appear to be ineffective, by the mediating role of parental emotional over-involvement and the moderating role of parent-child relationship intimacy. The findings also help linking up the gap between mechanisms of perceived support availability and actual support transactions, as well as results of experimental, correlational, and clinical observational researches.
|
|---|
