The Relationship Between College Students' Explicit Attitude And Implicit Attitude Toward Professional Psychological Help

As the unceasing increase of university enrollment and the employment pressure, college students'psychological health condition is unoptimistic. Owing to the more complicated psychological problems, more and more college students tend to offend others or go into suicide. Suffering from mental confusion but refusing to seek for professional psychological help will not only affects one's psychological health and even physiological health, it also inevitably has negative effect on other people. One of the most important factors of professional psychological help is the client's attitude. College students'attitude toward professional psychological help is an urgent question required to understand fully.On the basis of previous studies, the present research used scales of attitude to research college students'explicit attitude toward professional psychological help and Implicit Association Test to evaluate their implicit attitude. 200 college students took both two scales of attitude and three IATs. Then Confirmatory Factor Analysis was carried out to explore the structure of explicit attitude and implicit attitude.The results of the research reveal: (1)College students'explicit attitude and implicit attitude toward professional psychological help are both positive. College students have truly realized the importance of mental healthy as well as the scientific nature of professional psychological help. When suffering mental confusion, college students tend to seek professional psychological help.(2)The explicit attitude of male students is significantly lower than female students (scale1: t=-3.11,p=.00;scale 2:t=-3.26,p=.00). There is no significant difference between the implicit attitude of male students and female students. The results indicate that in the daily life, compared with female students, male students are more likely to conceal his real thought, and college psychology teachers should pay more attention to them. (3)The explicit attitude and implicit attitude of college students toward professional psychological help are different traits. Only carries on the explicit measure with implicit measure simultaneously, can we describe and explain the attitude of college students toward professional psychological help reasonably.(4)The SC-IAT can measure individual's implicit attitude. As an effective way of implicit measure, SC-IAT could be applied to other fields.