The Relationships Among Trait Anxiety, Stress, Coping And Mental Health

People with trait anxiety are used to worry and fear. Those people often have poor mental health, because they appear more intensive psychological stress response and show off inadequate coping when faced with stress situation. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among trait anxiety, stress, coping and mental health, so to help counselor and clinical psychologists to establish prevention and intervention measures.First, 510 undergraduates were as the samples, using the Chinese College Student Psychological Stress Scale (CCSPSS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory(STAI), the Chinese Adolescence Coping Styles Scale (CACSS) and Symptom Checklist 90(SCL-90). The relationships among trait anxiety, stress, coping and mental health had been explored, also as the moderating effect and the mediatig effect. Second, 38 undergraduates were chosen based on STAI and CACSS. The BIOPAC MP150 Systems was used to explore the effect of mental arithmetic stress on heart rate(HR), heart rate variability(HRV) and galvanic skin response(GSR) among undergraduates with different personality and coping styles. The conclusions were as follows:1. Psychological stress had significant positive correlation with mental symptoms; trait anxiety had significant positive correlation with mental symptoms.Trait anxiety had significant positive correlation with emotion-focused coping, but had significant negative correlation with situation-focused coping.2. Trait anxiety played moderating effect between life events and somatization, the same effect occurred between daily hassles and interpersonal sensitivity, paranoid ideation or psychoticism. Both situation-focused coping and emotion-focused coping played partly mediating effect between trait anxiety and mental health.3. During 5 minutes after mental arithmetic, it was more difficult for trait anxiety undergraduates to return to the baseline in physiological reactions than non-trait anxiety ones; and it was also more difficult for situation-focused coping undergraduates to return to the baseline in physiological reactions than emotion-focused coping ones.4. Trait anxiety and emotion-focused coping undergraduates displayed higher responsivity and weaker recovery in HR,HF,LF/HF ratio and GSR than other groups; non-trait anxiety and situation-focused coping undergraduates displayed lower responsivity in HF and GSR, and displayed higher recovery in LF/HF and GSR than other groups.