An Inquiry Of The Status Quo Of University Students' Perceived Social Support And Gratitude And The Study Of Their Relationship

Contrasted with received social support, perceived social support is an important component of social support. It refers to the individual emotional experience that may be or have been acquired understanding, respect,care,help and other support activities in social relations. It is the individual assessment, expectations and beliefs of social support, which has a close relationship with the individual subjective experience. In addition, there are relatively stable differences between the individuals. According to the source of the perception of social support, perceived social support can be divided into family support, friend support and other support. As the psychological reality of received social support, perceived social support responses the individual perception of received social support, and which has a more significant effect on emotions and feelings of the individual than received social support.Gratitude is an emotional trait by actively giving recognition and rewards to the benefactors after the beneficiaries knows that the positive results they achieved are due to the benefactors'good and gratis behavior. In order to accurately distinguish it from those concepts (gratefulness, obligation, debt, pleasure) with the similar meaning, one should first clear about the elements of gratitude, namely grace, beneficiaries, benefactors, ways of expressing gratitude and the meaning of gratitude degrees.Domestic and foreign scholars generally believe that social support influences mental and physical health, but they rarely relate social support with positive feelings and emotions. Separating perceived social support from the social support, people study even less the relationship between perceived social support and positive emotional trait---gratitude. And it is a merely blank in domestic for the study of relationship between perceived social support and gratitude, making the university students as the objects of study. Firstly, through translating, revising and forecasting the Gratitude Questionnaire 6 (GQ6) drew up by McCullough in 2002, the author makes the Gratitude Questionnaire 5 (GQ5) that suit for inquiry of the university students in our country. Secondly, using the revised questionnaire and perceived social support scale that drew up by姜亁金(1987) et al, the author makes an official measurement upon 381 students selected through convenient sampling method from 5 universities in Chongqing, in order to explore the status quo of university students'perceived social support and gratitude and its influencing factors, and to investigate the relationship between perceived social support and gratitude of university students. Thirdly, the study aims at guiding university students to have a correct perception of perceived social support, and raising the education sector's and the various social circles'concern and attention to the gratitude trait, based on the cognition of the relationship between perceived social support and gratitude of university students. Finally, based on this research conclusion, this paper makes some effective proposals of improving university students'perceived social support and gratitude, in order to promote their psychological health.The research results show that:1. The translated and revised GQ5 is more reliable and valid than GQ6, and it is more suitable for the measurement conducted on university students in the country.2. The status quo of the university students'perceived social support and gratitude are generally good.3. The demographic characteristics factors that influence university students' perceived social support and gratitude have genders, majors, educational levels and whether serving as student leaders or not,4. The perceived social support and its factors are positively related to gratitude, and the students of higher gratitude get a significant higher average score for the perceived social support than the corresponding group of students with lower gratitude.5. The gratitude has a significant positive forecasting effect on perceived social support. The higher the gratitude the students have, the higher perceived social support their is. And, The gratitude has a positive forecasting effect on the three factors of perceived social support, the highest forecasting effect on other support, the second concern is friend support, and the smallest concern is family support.