The Mental Health And Cognitive Bias Characteristics In College Students With Different Resilience And The Effect Of The Resilience Training

As a component of positive psychology, resilience is an indication of positive mentalhealth. Resilience has become the focus of psychological research. Resilience is broadlydefined as the capacity of individuals exposed to a negative event to remain healthy and tocope flexibly with challenges of life. Previous research found that resilience closely relatedto mental health, mainly reflected in the emotional flexibility and cognitive flexibility. Theresearchers abroad have found that resilience training can improve individuals’ ability todeal with stress and maintain healthy.Research on the psychological problems of college students is very important. In sum,the psychological problems of college students mainly include: environmental change andpsychological adaptation problems, learning psychological adjustment, emotional control,self cognition, personality development and other aspects of psychology and behaviordeviation due to interpersonal communication and love. At present, how about the status ofcollege students’ resilience level? What are the differences of college students withdifferent resilience on the emotional and cognitive bias? And whether resilience trainingcould improve college students’ resilience, positive emotion and cognitive reappraisalemotion regulation strategy? These questions have not been reported yet. Therefore, thisstudy aim to examine the impact of resilience on negative life events and mental healthproblems, and explore the emotional and cognitive characteristics of college students withdifferent resilience, and conduct resilience training on the college students to survey thechanges of the resilience, positive and negative emotion, emotion regulation style.Gradually, we can build up the effective program to promote the college students’ resiliencefor their better adaptation.Methods: Adopt the Connor-Davison Resilience Scale, Positive and Negative AffectScale, Emotion Regulation Questionnaire to survey2069college students’ status of resilience, positive and negative emotional level and styles of emotion regulation, and thenscreen92subjects that divided into high resilience group and low resilience group toparticipate in the experiments of emotional picture recognition and emotional wordsrecognition. Finally, conduct resilience training on the92students that divided into theblank control group and training group. All data are processed with SPSS15.0and Excelsoftware for statistical analysis. The main statistical methods include regression analysis, ttest and variance analysis.The main findings were as follows:1. Through the hierarchical regression and interaction analysis, we found thatpsychological resilience could buffer the effects of negative life events to mental health;2. Through the independent t-test, compared with low resilience group, the highresilience groups had significant higher scores on positive emotion and cognitive appraisal,and had significant lower scores on negative emotions and expression suppression.3. Through the emotional picture recognition experiment and emotional wordrecognition experiment: both groups had highest accuracy rate towards negative picturesand negative words. There were no significant accuracy rate differences towards three kindsof pictures between the two groups (P_postive=0.431, P_neutral=0.528, P_negative=0.726). Therewas significant accuracy rate difference towards positive emotion words between the twogroups, and no differences on other words(P_postive=0.002, P_neutral=0.405，P_negative=0.067).As for the high resilience group, the response time of positive pictures and positive wordswere significantly longer than that of neutral ones（P₁=0.008，P₂=0.002）. The response timeof negative pictures was significantly longer than that of neutral （P=0.002） and positiveones （P=0.000） for the low resilience group, and the response time of negative words wassignificantly longer than neutral （P=0.007） ones. The response time towards positivepictures in high resilience group was significant longer than that in low resilience group（P=0.022）, while the response time towards negative pictures was significant lower thanthat in low resilience group （P=0.043）. In addition, the response time towards positivewords in high resilience group was longer than that in low resilience group （P=0.002）.4. Compared with the results before, the scores on resilience, positive emotions andcognitive appraisal of low resilience experiment group increased significantly （P<0.05）,while the scores on negative emotions and expression suppression significantly decreased （P<0.05）; there were no significant differences of the scores on resilience, positiveemotions, negative emotions, cognitive appraisal and expression suppression of lowresilience control group compared to the former results（P>0.05）.In addition, the scores onpositive emotions of high resilience experiment group significantly increased （P<0.05）, andthe total scores on negative emotions and expression suppression significantly decreased（P<0.05）; compared to the former results, there were no significant differences on resilience,positive emotion, negative emotion, cognitive appraisal and expression suppression of highresilience control group （P>0.05）.In conclusion, this study concluded that:1. The negative life events and resilience both significantly influence on the mentalhealth problems. Resilience could decrease the effects of negative life events to mentalhealth problems, which explained that resilience had butter effect.2. There were significant differences on positive and negative emotions andemotionregulation styles of different resilience college students. The scores on positiveemotion and cognitive appraisal in high resilience group were significantly higher than thatin low resilience group, while were significantly lower on negative emotions andexpression suppression.3. High resilience students had more positive emotions, and made more use of thecognitive appraisal style; while the low resilience college students had more negativeemotions, and made more use of expression suppression; Behavioral experiments haveshown that the high resilience individuals tended to focus more on positive emotionalstimuli, while low individuals were easy to ignore positive emotional stimuli, whichshowed up the bias characteristics to negative emotional stimuli.4. The resilience training of Pennsylvania University could improve the resilience andpositive emotions of college students, and help them master positive emotion regulationstyle. It means that the resilience training program could apply to Chinese college studentsespecially for low resilience students.