Relationship Between Cognitive Flexibility And Coping Strategies Of High School Students

In recent years, the Cognitive Flexibility has become the hot spot and the front edge of the psychological study. Cognitive flexibility contains three aspects: (a) The awareness that the options and alternatives are available in any given situation. (b) The willingness to adapt to the any situation flexibly. (c) The self-efficacy to deal with all kinds of new situation.The questionnaire method was used to collect data. It was revised according to the results of pretests which was generalized and extended on cognitive flexibility among high school students in China. The revised Cognitive Flexibility Inventory and a High School Students'Way of Coping Inventory were administered to 550 students in Grade 1 to Grade 3 from key and ordinary high schools in Tangshan municipality.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:1. The revised cognitive flexibility inventory, which was including 12 items, had a good reliability and validity. And it had three dimensions: flexible option, flexible willingness, flexible efficacy.2. There were significant differences in the total of cognitive flexibility, the female's cognitive flexibility was higher than male's. The significant differences were found between school types in the dimensions of flexible option and flexible willingness. Specifically, students in key high school had a higher score than ordinary high school. There were not significant differences between library arts and science.3. There were significant grade differences in the dimensions of cognitive flexibility. The flexible option of Grade 3 is higher than Grade 2 and Grade 1, the flexible willingness of Grade 3 was higher than Grade 1. In the dimension of flexible efficacy, the results showed that the students of liberal arts were higher than science in Grade 1. And the students of Grade 1 were higher than Grade 2 in liberal arts.4. Significant positive correlations were found between cognitive flexibility and the dimensions of solving problem and reasonable explain. There were significant negative correlations between cognitive flexibility and tolerance, avoidance, let off emotion, imagination or deny. The students with high cognitive flexibility were more possible to use problem-focused coping than the students with low cognitive flexibility. And as for grades difference, Grade 3 is higher than Grade 2. However, when the students with low cognitive flexibility solve problems, girls are easier to use problem-focused coping than boys.5. The dimensions of flexible willingness and flexible efficacy had positive prediction for solving problem and reasonable explain. The flexible option and flexible willingness have negative prediction for tolerance, avoidance, imagination and deny. The flexible option and flexible efficacy have negative prediction for let off emotion. The regression analysis also showed that gender is the most influence then school types.