A Tentative Research Into The Correlation Between College Students' Confucianism & Taoism Values And Their Mental Health

As Chinese traditional culture is getting popular at present, more and more articles come out which do researches into mental health issues from the traditional value angle. However, most of the researches are scattered, one-sided as well as monotonous instead of overall, systematic and testable. In the circumstances, this article tries to make a close approach from Confucianism and Taoism's values to the features of Chinese traditional culture background and college students and correlation between them. Meanwhile, it's also a new way to gain the characteristics and influencing factors of college students'traditional values. What's more, this is also author's attempt at localizing psychological researches.This article chooses college students which are the elites as the objects of researches because they are the power to push the society forward. The methods of interview, questionnaire, theoretical and empirical perspective, analyzing exploratory and testable factors and structure equation are adopted to discuss the college students'Confucianism& Taoism values and how their thoughts are affected theoretically and practically. This research consists of three parts:1. Establishing the measure of college students'Taoism values2. The features of Confucianism values 3. Researching into the correlation between Confucianism& Taoism values and college students'subjective well-being &mental healthTo sum up, the results are as follows:1. The questionnaire about Taoism values contains six factors, namely magnanimity, naturalness-obeying, having few desires, detachment& easy, negative dialectic, returning to simplicity, 19 items in total. The analysis of exploratory factors proves the reliability and effectiveness of the questionnaire.2. Generally speaking, today's college students have positive and approval attitude to the Taoism values. The order of the average of Taoism is: magnanimityï¹¥negative dialecticï¹¥naturalness-obeyingï¹¥detachment& easyï¹¥returning to simplicityï¹¥having few desires.3. The female college students'attitudes towards Taoism's naturalness-obeying, detachment& easy, returning to simplicity and negative dialectic are more positive. The have a tendency to attach more importance to the Taoism values than the male students.4. College students still take a rather approved attitude to Confucianism values nowadays. The order of the average of Confucianism values is: harmonyï¹¥familismï¹¥modestyï¹¥diligenceï¹¥face-saving relation and this shows Chinese college students especially set a high value on familism and harmony.5. When it comes to"diligence", male college students are very different from female ones. The male apparently scored much more than the female. About Confucianism values, the third-year students got the lowest mark while the seniors got the highest. The students whose living expense is 1000~15000 Yuan make the lowest score and the ones who have more than 2000 Yuan living expense make the highest. So the divergences are very obvious.6. College students'subjective well-being is comparatively happy, to be more accurate, it's upper level/extent of the midrange.7. The correlation between college students'well-being varies directly with Confucianism values. That means the higher the well-being (index) is, the higher the score is. What's more, it's almost the same with the correlation between students'well-being and Taoism.8. Confucianism values forecast the extent of subjective well-being very well. The factor'face-saving relation'of Confucianism values has an obvious negative prediction function on college students'subjective well-being. Meanwhile, the other factors have distinct positive prediction function. Taoism values perform a prominent negative prediction function on subjective well-being. It endorses magnanimity, naturalness-obeying, having few desires and returning to simplicity which perform an obvious positive prediction function on returning objects.9. College students of higher mental health level are apt to agree with Confucianism values'familism, modesty and harmony. Generally speaking, the deeper the Confucianism values of students are, the mental healthier they are.10. Familism performs an obvious negative prediction function on interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, bigotry. Harmony has an obvious negative prediction function on somatization, obsessive-compulsive, depression, anxiety, phobia anxiety, psychoticism. Face-saving relation has a prominent positive prediction function on somatization, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobia anxiety, bigotry, psychoticism and other factors.11. Regarding the Taoism values, college students of higher mental health level are apt to approve of magnanimity and naturalness-obeying and far away from having few desires and detachment& easy.12. The factor'magnanimity'has an obvious negative prediction function on somatization, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, bigotry and psychoticism and other factors.'Obeying naturalness'has a distinct negative prediction function on interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, bigotry and psychoticism.'Having few desires'has an obvious positive prediction function on somatization, hostility, bigotry, psychoticism and other factors. Returning to simplicity performs a distinct positive prediction function on somatization. Detachment& easy has a prominent positive prediction function on obsessive-compulsive, psychoticism and other factors.13. The model of Confucianism & Taoism values and their mental health shows Confucianism values and Taoism values can complement each other, they can affect college students'mental heath.