The Correlation Research Between Psychological Capital And Psychological Health Of College Students

Since Luthans and Youssef had proposed the concept of positive psychological capital (short for psychological capital) in 2004, psychology, education and management researchers began to pay attention to the positive emotions and traits of individual, including love, optimism, hope, happiness, resilience, flow, the sense of happiness, and other important concepts. Psychological capital increasingly arouses the attention of psychological health researchers.Psychological capital, is the core mental element of general initiative for individuals (Luthans F, Avolio B.J, Walumbwa F.O, and Li W,2005), including the following four aspects, the initiative of individual psychology and behavior and personal advantage, the psychological state meet requirements of organizational environment, a good self-awareness and evaluation and the acquisition through investment and development. Four dimensions are included psychological capital:self-efficacy, resilience, hope and optimism.This research, based on the related concepts, theories and the current research situation of psychological capital and psychological health, conducted a study on two problems:firstly, the reliability and validity of psychological capital questionnaire was tested; secondly,689 college students was investigated by using psychological capital questionnaires and psychological symptom check list (SCL-90).This study focused on the following three questions:(1) the differences of psychological capital in demographic variables, (2) the differences of psychological health in demographic variables, (3) the relationship between psychological capital and psychological health status. The proposed hypothesis is confirmed in this research and the main conclusions are as follows:1. The questionnaire of psychological capital in this research includes four dimensions: self-efficacy, resilience, hope and optimism. The scale has good reliability and validity.2. The overall mean of psychological capital was 5.169; the mean scores of each factor were above 3.5, the midpoint value of the scale, in the middle or upper levels. The factor of hope got the highest score (5.549), and the factor of resilience got the lowest score (4.670), that is to say hope is the best and self-efficacy is the worst for university students. From gender perspective, levels of self-efficacy and resilience of male students were higher than females, significantly characterized by gender. From discipline perspective, significance was showed in the factor of optimism between liberal arts students and science and engineering students, liberal arts students were more optimistic than science and engineering. From grade perspective, students in different grades showed significance in overall psychological capital, resilience and hope, while in self-efficacy and optimism factors there was no significant difference. On the total score of psychological capital, freshman students scored significantly higher than the senior; while compared with the sophomore, junior, no significant difference existed, which reflecting the psychological capital level of senior students was significantly lower than other grades. On the dimension of resilience, freshman scored significantly higher than the junior and senior. On the hope dimension, freshmen scored significantly higher than sophomores, seniors. The juniors were the highest in optimistic level while the sophomores were the lowest; which showed a significant difference between the two. The factor of self-efficacy in the junior and senior had a significant difference, the former are more confident than the latter. From area perspective, students from non-rural areas were better than from rural on the dimension of self-efficacy.There were no significant differences in the overall psychological capital and factors in the items of whether the only child or not, family income, family type, or parental occupation.3. College students investigated in this research scored higher than the national norm in the overall psychological capital mean of and means of each factor, indicating their psychological health status is lower than the national average level. From gender perspective, the general level of psychological health status of male was significantly higher than female; while no significant difference showed in the factor scores of paranoid, psychosis and hostility item. From grade perspective, among different grade, level of psychological health existed significant differences, while only the factor of terror items was not significant. In which the highest level of psychological health was freshman, and sophomore the lowest. From good to bad status respectively:freshman, senior, junior, and sophomore. On nationality, number of children, discipline, parental income, single parents, and parental occupation items, there was no significant difference.4. The study showed a highly significant negative correlation between psychological capital and general psychological health, students with higher levels of psychological capital, have a better psychological health status. Psychological capital plays a certain but not very strong role in predicting psychological health; psychological capital can only explain few variance and variation (16.4%) of overall psychological health. Resilience and optimism has a more closely relationship psychological health. Finally, from the perspective of positive psychology, the paper put forward suggestions from both school and individual levels on how to promote psychological health of college students by develop and nurture their psychological capital,...