Research On The Relationship Among Optimism, Coping Style And Health

Optimism, a positive personality character, is a positive and stable cognitive appraisal orientation for individual's present and future. The optimism is one of the most important central concepts in the positive psychology, and it has been a focus in the psychological study. From the former studies in the West, optimism has a high correlation with individual's future focus and it is the predictor of people's physical-mental health. So it makes much sense to study optimism in college students in our country.Based on the review of the concepts, structures, measurements and applied researches of optimism, this research had 703 college students measured on five questionnaires, utilizing spss11.0 and Amos4.0 to analyze the data. The purpose of the research was to explore the relationship among optimism, coping style, health status, depression and satisfaction with life, and to test the mediator effect of coping style between optimism and health status. The results showed that:1. The reliability and validity of LOT-R Chinese Version were psychometrically acceptable, so it could be used to measure individual's dispositional optimism in this research.2. The differences among college students' gender and specialty to dispositional optimism were not found. The significant difference among grade to dispositional optimism was found. The freshman had higher level of optimism than the sophomore and junior, and had lower level of pessimism than them.3. The optimist's level of optimism, satisfaction with life, level of depression, coping style and health status were quite different from the pessimist's. The optimist's level of optimism, satisfaction with life, health status and positive coping style, including solving-problem and seeking-help were higher than the pessimist's. The pessimist's level of depression and negative coping style, including self-blame, retreat and reasonableness were higher than the optimist's.4. Dispositional optimism had significantly positive correlation with physical health, mental health, social health and general health status. Dispositional optimism had significantly positive correlation with positive coping style, including solving-problem and seeking-help, and had negative correlation with negative coping style, including self-blame, illusion, retreat and reasonableness.5. Dispositional optimism could predict coping style, physical health, mental health and social health directly. Seeking-help and retreat were partial mediators between optimism and physical health, mental health and social health. Reasonableness was a full mediator between optimism and physical health, mental health and social health. Solving-problem and self-blame were partial mediators between optimism and mental health.