Self-supporting Personality And Mental Health Of College Students——A Longitudinal Study

Self-supporting personality, an important positive personality trait in traditional Chinese cultures, has been regarded as the main content of sound personality and protective personality factor of mental health. It can hereby be hypothesized that self-supporting personality is the protective personality factor of mental health, influencing, to a certain degree, individuals’psychosomatic symptoms.Based on the Self-Supporting Personality Scale of Adolescent Students (SSPS-AS) and the Self-Report Symptom Inventory, Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90), this research conducts the analysis twice (6-month interval) among 369 effective subjects, undergraduate students from one key university and two non-key universities in Sichuan province. Many psychological statistical methods such as variance analysis, correlation analysis and cross-lagged path analysis in General linear model are adopted to explore the respective features of self-supporting personality and psychosomatic symptoms of college students and the relations between the two.The result suggests that self-supporting personality and psychosomatic symptoms are both stable; dimensions of interpersonal self-support and personal self-support within self-supporting personality are significantly related to psychosomatic symptom of college students. That is, the higher level of dimensions within self-supporting personality corresponds with the less problematical psychosomatic symptom. It can therefore be said that interpersonal responsibility and personal responsibility can be applied to cross-time prediction of college students’psychosomatic symptoms. The conclusion of the present research supports the hypothesis that self-supporting personality is the protective personality factor of mental health.