ANALYSIS ON THE CHANGES OF WOMEN'S ROLE EMOTION AND BEHAVIOR IN VARIOUS SOCIAL ACTIVITIES IN THE MING AND QING DYNASTIES
Authors: Sun Zhaoyang , Cheng Yu 
Published: July 2022

Background

In ancient China, especially in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there are a large number of historical materials about festival activities. However, related works mainly describe festival activities from the perspective of men, rarely record women's festival activities, and the content is very scattered. This not only increases the difficulty of women's festival research, but also the main reason for the lack of relevant research results. Therefore, this paper also studies the changes of women's emotional behavior in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

Research Objects and Methods

Based on the local chronicles and festival works in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, this study systematically combs the tracks of women in various festival activities. Link their roles as believers, pilgrims, organizers, sponsors and tourists to their family and social roles. From the perspective of role psychology, this paper analyzes the relationship between the two roles and the main reasons for women's active participation in festival activities. A coping style scale was developed. We analyzed the correlation between the role emotional behavior and the trajectory of women's festival activities.

Results

Fulfilling family responsibilities is the main psychological motivation and important content of women's participation in festival activities, and it is also a reasonable excuse for them to carry out sightseeing activities; The practice of participating in festivals as workers reflects women's expectations of more business income to meet economic needs; As believers and tourists, participating in festival activities is the embodiment of their role socialization, reflecting their enthusiasm and social needs to enter the broad social stage. It has the nature of personality liberation, which shows that women have broken through the gender restrictions of traditional society to a certain extent. According to the data of way scale, this study found that women's psychological quality was significantly positively correlated with cognitive reappraisal and negatively correlated with expression inhibition; Researchers believe that the development of metacognition is the basis for the development of women's emotion regulation strategies, and psychological quality is composed of cognitive quality, personality quality and adaptability. The core of cognitive quality is metacognition. In addition, the adaptability of psychological quality also includes emotional adaptation, which is closely related to emotional regulation strategies. Therefore, psychological quality is closely related to emotion regulation strategies. This study also verified that cognitive reappraisal was significantly negatively correlated with negative indicators of mental health, while expression inhibition was significantly positively correlated with negative indicators of mental health.

Conclusion

The worship of God in traditional society and the role of women as family and social workers provide high sounding reasons for them to participate in festival social activities. After the mid Ming Dynasty, the development of commercial economy and the rise of civil society promoted the opening of society and the diversification of values. Compared with the narrow social space in other fields, the social activity space of women's festivals is becoming larger and larger. Their roles in festival activities, such as believers, pilgrims, organizers, sponsors and tourists, are closely related to their social roles. Their devotion and enthusiasm to festival activities are also closely related to their social and psychological needs and expectations. The nature of social roles is different, and the motivation and content of women's participation in festival activities are also different. It can also help contemporary Chinese society analyze the three special factors of female attention, cognitive attention and physical attention. When researchers want to use special factors such as social attention, cognitive attention and physical attention to predict external variables, they should more effectively consider the influence of public factors, so as to explain the prediction results independently.

Acknowledgements

The paper is the phased research result of the Later-funded Project “Research on Ancient Chinese Women's Culture” (Project No.: 19FZSB047) funded by the National Social Science Foundation and the 2021 Academic Degrees & Graduate Education Reform Project of Henan Province “Research on Cultivation of Professional Practice Ability of MTCSOL ---- Taking Anyang Normal University for Example” (Project No.: 2021SJGLX223Y).