The Negative Impact of Online "Mourning Culture" on Adolescents' Self ‐ identity and Countermeasures

: As an emerging online term, "mourning culture" represents a subculture that is prevalent among contemporary teenagers. Most of them rely on "memes" or a series of works expressing negative emotions for dissemination, coupled with the promotion of new media platforms, the spread of online "mourning culture" in recent years is extremely fast and widespread. With the popularization of electronic communication products, the trend of "mourning culture" also has a younger trend, which promotes a decadent and numb lifestyle and attitude, with strong penetration and dissemination power, and the psychological reasons behind it are complex and diverse. Teenagers are keen to express their dissatisfaction with reality on the Internet with "mourning pictures", so they have gradually derived their unique "mourning culture", which has also become the main channel for them to vent their negative emotions. For minors, especially adolescents who have not successfully acquired self-identity, the "mourning culture" affects their smooth acquisition of self-identity on the road to growth. It is necessary to reflect on the root cause of the "mourning culture", pay attention to the reasonable needs of young people, and correctly guide young people to understand themselves


Overview of Self-identity
Self-identity, that is, the personification of adolescent identity, refers to the integration of adolescents' needs, emotions, abilities, goals, values and other characteristics into a unified personality framework, that is, with self-consistent emotions and attitudes, self-coherent needs and abilities, selfconstant goals and beliefs [1]. Theoretically, self-identity due to its unique nature will lead to a healthier mind and greater happiness in individuals. Studies have shown a positive correlation between life satisfaction and the level of selfidentity development. When the individual is in the atmosphere of "mourning culture" for a long time, the individual's satisfaction with life will be affected, affecting the acquisition of self-identity. Self-identity, as a dynamically developing organization, manifests itself differently at different stages of individual development. If its formation is blocked, a crisis of self-identity occurs. The crisis of selfidentity refers to the individual's awareness of the limitations and conflicts of his or her own development. It both denies the originally low-maturity self and fails to give a clear direction for future development, so that it cannot adapt to its own state, and feels the uncertainty and interruption, and even the disconnection, inherent in the past and present self.

Overview of "Mourning Culture"
Xiao Ziyang believes that mourning culture is a language, with obvious negative emotions such as decadence and pessimism, which is widely popular among young people. As a form of emerging youth subculture, mourning culture is a way for young people to seek self-identification. As the social structure changes, the social pressures on young people are increasing. Many young people lose motivation because they are powerless to confront real-life difficulties. Adolescents, as the predecessors of youth, are also affected, manifested as academic burnout, loss of expectations for the future, cessation of their career exploration and planning, stagnant self-identity or early closure, and so on. The mourning culture appears in the form of a subculture, and the decadent, lazy lifestyle it expresses is actually a way for young people to escape reality and contradictions, so that they can get selfvent and release stress.
Nowadays, in the information age, some emerging subcultural styles inevitably have obvious network characteristics. In this context, mourning culture completes its unique style construction through various forms of mourning memes, texts, and film and television works on the Internet. Embodied in written language, mourning culture often expresses its resistance to reality in a playful and humorous way. Once we were surrounded by sensational words of encouragement similar to "hard work will reap rewards", today's mourning culture does the opposite, using a humorous and satirical language to counter the so-called success science: "If you don't work hard, how can you know what despair is." "The mourning culture provides a new way of expression for people, which is also a unique linguistic feature of the mourning culture. Mourning culture can also be expressed through pictures, and many popular mourning memes have appeared, such as "sad frogs", which vividly convey the anxiety of the mourning culture group through pictures.

The Reasons for the Formation of
"Mourning Culture" on the Internet

Defensive Pessimism
Defensive pessimism, a concept coined by Norem et al., refers to setting unrealistically low expectations when faced with new, similar situations despite having been successful in past situations. Researchers commonly use defensive pessimism as a cognitive strategy in the context of human achievement. It has two goals, self-preservation and motivation: self-preservation enables individuals to protect themselves against possible failures; motivation motivates individuals to work harder to increase the probability of success. Setting low levels of expectations for one's own future achievement is one of the hallmarks of defensive pessimism, which primarily serves the goal of selfpreservation, in addition to using anxiety and negativity about possible failure to serve motivational goals.
Defensive pessimists will "plan for the worst in advance". They regard pessimism as an effective strategy for anxiety management. the occurrence of the situation. They will deliberately focus on all the things that can go wrong, and use this as motivation to try to do better. Defensive pessimists are good at using negative thoughts correctly to manage inner anxiety, thereby increasing the degree of control over the outcome of things.

Echo Chamber Effect
The concept of "echo chamber effect" was proposed by American scholars Elsten and Bryn Joyfson in 1996. In the 1990s, with the popularization of Internet technology, more and more information on the Internet led to information overload in human society. Therefore, people will be more selective in receiving the information they are interested in. In the Internet space in the era of big data, platforms tend to push relatively homogeneous information and groups to users, and users' concepts are further strengthened, and they tend to regard it as the truth, unconsciously narrowing their horizons and horizons, and focusing on new Information adopts an evasive attitude, and if things go on like this, it will become complacent and even paranoid. In addition, social media has strengthened the differentiation of the crowd to a certain extent. Due to the influence of social circles and their own positions and attitudes, people tend to cling to the information and opinion circles that suit their preferences, and each circle is isolated or even opposed to each other.

Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness refers to a psychological state in which individuals face an uncontrollable situation after experiencing some kind of learning and form an uncontrollable cognition that no matter how hard they try, they cannot change the outcome of the matter, which then leads to giving up their efforts [2]. Studies have found that if a person consistently fails at a job, he or she will quit the job. The adverse effect of this "learned helplessness" on young students is the continuation of the students' past learning experience, learning habits and learning ability. It is mainly manifested in three aspects: cognition, emotion and behavior: From the perspective of cognition, some teenagers do not correctly understand the professional learning mission, and fail to establish a good dynamic learning process due to the sense of failure in past learning experience and improper learning attitude, still follow the old learning habits, in a passive "one-way" learning acceptance, and even form a selfenclosed learning; in terms of emotion, it is mainly the emotions and psychology caused by students' performance and grades in the learning process, such as Personal anxiety about academic future, depression and paranoia caused by poor academic performance, and even bad psychology such as low self-esteem; in terms of behavior, because of the longterm lack of sense of achievement in academics, the motivation to continue learning has not been stimulated, leading to a sense of boredom in learning .

Emotional Infection
American psychologist Elaine Hatfield and colleagues conducted a systematic study on emotional contagion. They believe that in the process of interaction, individuals will unconsciously imitate other people's facial expressions, body expressions, speech and other behaviors, and tend to capture other people's emotions at any time. They constructed the imitation-feedback mechanism of emotional contagion, and believed that emotional contagion includes three stages: imitation, feedback and infection. Through these three stages, when the individual is immersed in the emotional sharing environment, the "mourning" emotion flowing into the public space will trigger similar emotions in the individual, and the sharing of emotions will also stimulate the second sharing behavior. Teenagers are one of the most special audiences in Internet culture. They are in the "semi-independent" stage of life, their values have not yet been formed and they are easily influenced by the outside world. When young people have been immersed in the atmosphere of "mourning" for a long time, under the influence of imitation, young people superficially equate "mourning" with "cool", and regard it as one of the signs to show their own uniqueness.

The Negative Impact of "Mourning
Culture" on Self-identity

Strengthen the Negative Self-identity of Some Individuals
Often, people consciously hide or suppress negative sexual tendencies and show positivity in reality, in order to follow social norms and the expectations of others to avoid social exclusion. In the information age, the "mourning culture" has spread rapidly among teenagers with the help of the Internet and multimedia, and due to factors, such as the virtuality and de-inhibition of the Internet, it is easier for individuals to unload their defenses on the Internet and show their negative side. More homogeneous information can be accessed on the Internet, and for adolescents with poor discrimination ability, it will strengthen the negative self-identity of the individual.

Causing Premature Closure of Some Individuals' Self-identity
The culture of bereavement allows people to develop a series of negative language and even attitudes when dealing with stress. For example, this makes some people in the confused period of self-development gradually produce a negative psychology of self-abandonment on the road of life development, stop exploring their future possibilities, and lead to premature closure of self-identity. Others focus too much on online information, viewing the expectations or suggestions received on the Internet as authoritative and accepting the views contained therein without scrutiny. Ignoring the subjective needs of individuals and selfevaluation, it is mainly dependent on external resources or rules, which is difficult to achieve internal self-construction, resulting in premature closure of self-identity.

Causing the Delay of Self-identity of Some Individuals
Some people browse a lot of different online information to explore themselves, wandering between the bizarre online media, hoping to determine development goals through the information given by the online world. However, the collision of different values on the Internet and the contradiction between self-evaluation have led to the difficulty of some people in effectively integrating the avoidance of multiple factors under different circumstances, unable to make active and effective investment in expected goals and values, and losing confidence in dealing with reality, so it is difficult to prolong the process of self-knowledge and exploration, and show a delay in self-identity.

Causing Confusion about the Identity of Some Individuals
Due to factors such as the interoperability of individuals and the multiplicity of social role play, the concept of "mourning culture" accepted by individuals is different from the positive attitude and learning concept advocated in real life, so individuals with poor self-integration ability will present the separation and conflict between the outer self and the inner self. Some people will let themselves fall into depression for a long time, let fake depression become real depression, use negative and depressive thinking to deal with practical problems in real life, thereby breaking the balance and stability between the inner world and the outer world, destroying the internal consistency and continuity previously established, and even causing multiple personalities or split personalities in severe cases.

Correct Self-role Cognition and Prevent Virtual Social Dependence
The rise of virtual social networks has replaced physical communication between people to some extent, reducing people's loneliness. But in general, the friendships and fun fostered by social networking sites are often illusory and fleeting. Online socializing exacerbates personal isolation from society, weakens people's ability to deal with real problems, and leads to cognitive dislocation and behavioral dislocation. To avoid virtual social dependence, it is necessary to fully understand one's social identity with a calm and objective attitude, grasp the behavior patterns derived from this identity, regularly conduct in-depth and objective analysis of one's inner activities, words and deeds, and establish a new social circle in the real society. Through interpersonal communication in the real society, strengthen face-to-face interaction and communication, meet personal social needs, improve personal satisfaction, and replace virtual network social networking with fulfilling real life.

Establish a Sense of Self-subjectivity and be Vigilant Against Online Empathy
Online empathy refers to a person's transfer of his feelings about a specific object in real life to online media, and takes the views in online media as a guideline, treating them as spiritual dependence, thereby causing physical, mental, cognitive, behavioral and other problems, damaging normal social functions, and limiting the development of personal self-identity [3]. To abandon network empathy, it is necessary to cultivate a sense of self-agency in study and life. Starting from independent consciousness and active awareness, clarify their own subject value and status, sort out the relationship with the objective world, neither blindly follow any external authority or rules, nor be afraid of any real dilemmas and challenges, maintain the ability to make independent judgments in personal pursuits, and adopt scientific attitudes and methods in the process of planning self-development blueprints.

Improve Self-monitoring Capabilities and Refuse Excessive Use of the Internet
Internet users often unknowingly spend a lot of time and energy on online activities, especially network over-users, who are prone to immersion in repetitive information, build virtual selves on the network, internalize false beliefs into their own cognition, resulting in obvious damage to their social functioning and mental health. To prevent excessive use of the Internet, it is necessary to scientifically selfregulate, correctly implement self-management, establish the goal of self-action, deal with various pressures and setbacks with a positive attitude, master psychological counseling methods such as catharsis, counseling, sublimation, compensation, and self-suggestion, overcome bad network behavior habits, actively regulate bad emotions caused by excessive use of the Internet, strengthen self-supervision, and strive to unify reasonable thinking and realistic self.