Abstract
Career choice anxiety is an emotional state of feeling nervous, worried or fearful when People cannot choose and commit to a particular career, which will affect the physical and mental health of college students and hinder their employment. Some empirical researches have proved that career adaptability is closely related to career anxiety, and which can predict career anxiety. According to the social information processing theory, people with different career adaptability have attention bias, and make different attribution, which may lead to anxiety. Positive affectivity was associated with attributional style for positive, but not negative events, and negative affectivity was associated with attributional style for negative, but not positive events. So, in the current study, the negative event attributional style and positive event attributional style were studied as two variables respectively, and with attentional bias played a different role in the relationship between career adaptability and career anxiety. Therefore, we hypothesized that career adaptability affected Career choice anxiety which was mediated by positive event attributional style, attentional bias and positive event attributional style. Besides, negative event attributional style played a moderating role between career adaptability and turnover intention.
Sixty college students participated in the study and were assigned to complete experiment and questionnaires. Attentional bias was measured by the dot-probe task, and career adaptability, attribution and career choice anxiety were assessed by questionnaires. All the questionnaires were well-established in the literature. SPSS25.0 and lisrel8.8 were employed to perform a series of statistical analyses, and Andrew Hayes’ PROCESS macro for SPSS was used to analyze the mediating or moderating effect of attention bias and attribution style, and Johnson -Neyman technique was adopted to quantify the moderation effect of negative event attributional style.
The results showed that: (1) Career adaptability not only had a direct and negative effect on career choice anxiety, but also had indirect and negative effect through both the separate mediation path of positive event attributional style and the chained mediation of attention bias and positive event attributional style. (2) negative event attributional style moderated the direct relationship between career adaptability and career choice anxiety. Specifically, when negative events were positively attributed, career adaptability would affect career choice anxiety. When negative events were negatively attributed, career adaptability has no significant effect on career anxiety, because all had high career choice anxiety.
Therefore, the effect of career adaptability on college students’ career choice anxiety was a mediated moderating effect. The mediated moderating model significantly revealed the effect mechanism of career adaptability on college students’ career choice anxiety, which could contribute to a better understanding of how individuals in different career adaptability cause career choice anxiety. Furthermore, it suggested that the training of career adaptability and positive attribution is an important way to alleviate career choice anxiety.
Key words
career adaptability /
career choice anxiety /
attentional bias /
positive event attributional style /
negative event attributional style
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Xiao-Li SHU jing-shan WU Rui JuanFU lin guiwang.
Relationship between Career Adaptability and Career Choice Anxiety: the Cognitive Processing of Attention Bias and Attribution[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(5): 1193-1200
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