The Research Of The Realtion Between Reflection And Mental Health

Disclosing the relation between reflection and mental health has important practical implication, providing individual-centered methods for primary prevention.Many scholars believe reflection is rethinking one's thoughts and behavior actively, persistently and carefully. But in fact, reflection involves not only thoughts and behavior, but also one's emotion, body situation, ever-changing self-orientation in environment. So, definitely, reflection is a process in which one deals with self's inner mentality, behavior and his milieu in tentative attitude, self-adjust behavior. Reflection, ameliorated by reflective practice, embodies both thinking ability and personality. Reflection has an effect on mental health through improving self's function. Analysis of various rationales indicates that the nature of psycho-analysis therapy is to facilitate reflection, that the nature of cognitive therapy is a type of reflective practice, that the self-reinforcement is based on reflection and that the core of client-centered therapy is to ponder over self. Therefore improving reflective ability is helpful for mental health.Reflection is different from iteratively thinking which is the symptom of some behavior disturbances. The former is active, conscious and valid, and the latter is unconscious, passive and invalid.This research constructs Questionnaire of Life Experience to measure reflective ability. The validity of this questionnaire is rtt^O.86, and its' reliability is rpb=0.62. And the discrimination of most items is acceptable. Measurement indicates that reflective ability is multidimensional.This research takes the experimental design of pretest and posttest with experimental and comparative group, the score on Questionnaire of Life Experience as index of reflective ability, the score of every factor on SCL-90 as index of mentalhealth. Experimental group participate in reflective practice for 5 weeks. Results indicate that, the correlation between the score of every factor on SCL-90 and the score on Questionnaire of Life Experience is negative. The score of every factor on SCL-90 changes significantly after the experimental group finished their reflective practice.Conclusions of this research are, (1) Questionnaire of Life Experience can be used to measure reflection. Statistical analysis indicates that reflection is multidimensional. (2) Behavioral and emotional problems from college students indicates their reflection is not sufficient. (3) Senior students' score of reflective test is litter higher than junior students', but the difference is not significant, and the individual difference of reflective ability is diminishing while the grades promote. (4) Individuals who are more reflective are more mentally healthy. (S)Reflective practice, having various forms, improves mental health with different degree according to certain individual. (6)The mechanism for reflective practice to improve mental health is to strengthen ego's function.Questionnaire of Life Experience and experimental group are not perfect, which is the deficit of this research.