Shyness and self-disclosure among college students: the mediating role of psychological security and its gender difference

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.