Workplace Stress as a Mediator between Social Comparison Orientation and Anxiety among Chinese Female Workers: Evidence from Textual Analysis
Wen-Cheng WangAbstract
Objectives
From the perspective of occupational mental health, this study examines how social comparison orientation, as a psychosocial stressor, influences Chinese female workers’ perceived workplace stress and anxiety symptoms. The study aims to elucidate the underlying psychological risk mechanisms inherent in competitive work environments.
Methods
A total of 4,043 female workplace-related posts were collected from the Chinese knowledge-sharing platform Zhihu between 2022 and 2024. Topic modeling was performed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. Structural relationships among social comparison, stressors, and expressions of anxiety were further examined through keyword co-occurrence and sentiment-semantic analyses. Model evaluation indicated that a six-topic solution demonstrated optimal performance (perplexity = 942.6; topic coherence C<sub>V</sub> = 0.49).
Results
Findings indicate that upward social comparisons were predominantly concentrated on three themes: income and promotion pressure, time and energy depletion, and gender-role comparisons, together accounting for approximately 68% of anxiety-related content. Career development comparisons co-occurred strongly with persistent tension and feelings of helplessness; workload and work–family conflict were associated with heightened psychological exhaustion; and gendered comparisons further amplified declines in self-efficacy and performance-related anxiety. Overall, the co-occurrence and sentiment analyses indicated that texts exhibiting high upward social comparison scores (measured via keyword frequency and semantic similarity metrics) were significantly more likely to contain workplace stress indicators (χ2 = 56.7, p < 0.001) and anxiety expressions (χ2 = 48.2, p < 0.001).
Conclusions
Social comparison orientation constitutes a significant psychological predictor of anxiety risk among Chinese female workers. Interventions aimed at promoting occupational mental health should focus on mitigating comparison-driven stress, enhancing organizational support, and implementing gender-sensitive strategies for stress management and mental health promotion.
Corresponding Author
Wen-Cheng Wang, The College of Metaverse and New Media, Yango University, Fuzhou, China.