Social Support And Gratitude Of Prisoners: Mediating Effect Of Belief In A Just World

With the boom of positive psychology in the late twentieth century,human's healthy,happiness and harmonious development entered into the psychologists' view.To promote more positive experience for human by study has became the focus in contemporary psychology research.With the development of the research,an increasing number of results have been widely used in social groups.However,the positive psychology research of special groups is still in its infancy.In view of this,this paper aims to explore the path of prisoners' positive development and offer the rationalization proposals for prisoners' educational reform work to help prisoners resocialization through the exploration of the relationship among social support,belief in a just world and gratitude.It is helpful not only in the development of positive psychology but also in prison education which under the background of the socialist harmonious society.After the revision of the gratitude scale for the prisoner,800 prisoners who were randomly selected from partly prisons in central china were evaluated with the Social Support Scale,Belief in a Just World Scale,Gratitude Scale of Prisoners.The main conclusions go as follows:(1)The gratitude scale of prisoners was the revision of Ma's college students gratitude scale based on Mocullough's gratitude theory and prisoners' situation.The scale includes four dimensions as the depth of gratitude,the density of gratitude,the frequency of gratitude,the span of gratitude,and the scale use five point scoring method,includes positive scoring and negative scoring.(2)Age,sex,term of imprisonment,labor status,education level,family background were the influence factors of prisoners' social support;Age and family background were the influence factors of prisoners' belief in a just world;Age andeducation level were the influence factors of prisoners' gratitude.(3)There existed significant positive correlation among prisoners' social support,belief in a just world and gratitude,and there also existed significant positive correlation among the dimensions.(4)Prisoners' social support could positively predict their belief in a just world and gratitude,the belief in a just world could positively predict their gratitude.(5)Prisoners' belief in a just world exerted partial mediating effect on the relations between their social support and gratitude,and all the dimensions of objective support,subjective support and support availability exerted indirect effect on gratitude through the personal belief in a just world and the general belief in a just world.