| Procrastination is a prevalent phenomenon in today’s society,with negative impacts on individuals’ learning,work,and life.The university stage is a critical period for students to develop independent learning and living skills.However,many students experience poor academic performance and compromised mental health due to severe procrastination behavior.Therefore,exploring the influencing factors of procrastination and finding effective intervention methods to reduce it are important research directions.Existing studies have indicated that anxiety is one of the important factors affecting procrastination behavior,which in turn leads to further increases in anxiety,forming a vicious circle.Rumination is an important mediating variable for anxiety to predict procrastination.Rumination is divided into positive and negative,while previous studies have mainly focused on negative rumination and not enough attention has been paid to positive rumination.Based on this,the present study examined the mediating role of positive rumination and negative rumination in the relationship between anxiety and procrastination behavior.In addition,research has shown that expressive writing can effectively reduce individual rumination.Based on this,the present study used expressive writing to intervene in the positive and negative rumination of the subjects in order to reduce their procrastination behaviors.Study 1 conducted a questionnaire survey with 478 university students to examine the relation between anxiety,positive rumination,negative rumination,and procrastination behavior.(1)There were significant correlations between anxiety,positive rumination,negative rumination and procrastination.Among them,anxiety,negative rumination,and procrastination were positively correlated with each other,while positive rumination was significantly negatively correlated with the above variables.(2)Positive rumination,and negative rumination both played a mediating role in the association between anxiety and procrastination behavior.Study 2 used expressive writing as an intervention method.The participants were90 college students,who were randomly divided into three groups: intervention group,active control group and blank control group,and the data of the three groups of participants were collected using the diary method.During the 14-day study,participants in the intervention group performed 10 minutes of expressive writing and completed the questionnaire every day,the active control group participants performed 10 minutes of neutral topic writing(mainly life records,not involving emotions and thoughts)and completed the questionnaire every day,and the blank group participants only completed the questionnaire every day.This study was aimed to explore the intervention effects of expressive writing,monitor daily status,and reveal the dynamic process of intervention effects.The results are as follows:(1)For the intervention group,the scores of negative rumination,positive rumination,and procrastination behavior after expressive writing were significantly different from those in the pre-test.There was no significant difference between the scores for the active control group and the blank group.(2)A follow-up survey was conducted one month after the end of the intervention,and the differences in the variables of the participants in the intervention group maintained,and there was still no significant difference in the scores of the variables for the active control group and the blank group.Through the above two studies,this study examined the mediating role of positive rumination and negative rumination in the association between anxiety and procrastination,and confirmed that expressive writing can effectively reduce individuals’ negative rumination and increase individuals’ positive rumination to reduce procrastination behavior.Findings of this study provide empirical support for interventions aimed at reducing procrastination behavior in college students. |
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