The Influence Of Purpose In Life On College Students’ Daily Stress And Its Mechanism

There are many reasons for the mental health problems of college students,among which various pressures in the school environment are considered to be one of the reasons that affect the mental health and adaptation of college students.Stress can damage people’s mental and physical health.But the cognitive model of stress points out that the real cause of adverse effects is not the pressure itself,but the subjective perception of the event,namely,the perceived stress,which is generated by the individual when facing the pressure event after the evaluation.Facing the same pressure environment,different individuals’perception of stress is different.Some people have higher level of pressure perception,others feel lower pressure and adapt well.The possible reason is that there are some protective factors that play a buffer role in the process of pressure source affecting the pressure perception response.The research found that the goal of life is one of the stress buffer variables.When faced with life full of daily hassles,those with higher goals tend to report less negative effects and fewer physical and mental symptoms.There are two possible mechanisms for the adverse reactions of life goals to help individuals reduce stress:first,the baseline level of stress perception of high-level life purpose-oriented individuals is higher,that is,it is less likely to generate stress perception;second,the high-level life purpose individuals are more likely to recover after they have the pressure awareness.Therefore,this study intends to introduce the life goal as the buffer variable of pressure,to explore its impact on the daily life of college students,and to further test the mechanism of the effect of life purpose on stress perception through experimental methods.This study consists of two sub studies.The first study examines the influence of purpose in life on the daily stress of college students.Taking a college student as the subject,766 college students were investigated by using the questionnaire of recent life experience,perceived stress,five person scale and PIL-SF.The second study tested the mechanism of the effect of purpose in life(PIL)on College Students’ stress perception.The subjects with low PIL and high PIL were selected in Study 1.The experiment method of Trier Social Stress test was used to compare the differences between behavioral and physiological indexes of stress response of subjects with different life goals under the stress environment of laboratory.The results show that:(1)Daily hassles is very common in college students’ life.From the whole university period,the dominant position is the pressure and study pressure in the challenge of personal development.(2)The purpose in life can reduce the two sub dimensions of daily hassles on perceived stress:the influence of tension and out of control.The effect of goal sense on the sense of out of control is more influenced by personality factors,and the influence on stress is still significant after controlling personality factors.(3)The baseline level of high life purpose individuals to stress perception is higher,that is,purpose in life play a protective role by reducing the individual’s response to stress sources,rather than by influencing the recovery of individuals after stress..