Research On Time Mental Accounts Of University Students And Its Relationship With Mental Health

In1985, Richard Thalar put forward the theory of mental accounts which torepresent people’s classification results (especially in the economic results, billing),coding, valuation and budget process psychologically. The definition of mentalaccounts is not strictly defined money. Time, as a highly valuable resource, is thesame as money, and it may also become the object of mental accounts.Based on this, the paper carried out three studies: in study1, literature review,interviews and questionnaires were adopted to explore the time distribution andclassification structure of time psychological account of college students; in study2,2×3(time source, the amount of time) two-factor completely randomized experimentwere designed to explore the match of different sources and different purposes of timemental accounts; in study3, firstly, single factor experiment was designed to explorethe allocation of free time in the learning and entertainment schedule, and then westudied the relationship between the students’ time allocation and the mental healthlevel. The results showed that:(1) College students have many mental accounts in their daily life, includingleisure time accounts, professional learning time accounts, social interaction timeaccounts, social activities time accounts, interesting learning time accounts and dailylife time accounts.(2) The differences of the allocation of time in gender and grade are significant,time that girls assigned to learn is significantly higher than the boys’, and time thatboys’ assigned to leisure is significantly higher than the girls; freshmen’s time issignificantly higher than the sophomore’s, the junior’s and the senior’s, time thatfreshmen assigned to a fun was significantly lower than the sophomore.(3) When the amount of time is3hours, according to different sources of time,the test assigns different mental accounts to it. When the time comes from the learningtime accounts, subjects tend to spend more time on learning activities; when the timecomes from the leisure time accounts, subjects tend to spend more time on recreational activities.(4) Arranged in different schedule scenario, the free time assigned to learn andplay is significantly different. Subjects tend to spend more time of learning scheduleto entertainment, and entertainment schedule to spend more time to learn.(5) In the learning schedule, there was a significant negative correlation betweenstudy time and mental health of the college students; in entertainment schedule, thereis a significant positive correlation between study time and mental health of thecollege students.