The Research Of College Students’ Character Strengths And The Relationship Between Character Strengths And Mental Health

The positive psychology which was formed at the end of 20th century has provided a brand-new perspective for improving people’s mental health level.The research involves the study of positive emotions, positive characters, and positive institutions. Among them, the study of character strengths belongs to the research category of positive characters. The character strengths are made up of a group of positive traits manifested in an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The study of character strengths is an important subject in the field of positive psychology.This study used 391 undergraduate students of four different departments in a domestic comprehensive university (College of Liberal Arts, School of physics, School of Physical Education, School of Fine Art) as respondents, and conducted two studies with Chinese Virtues Questionnaire(VQ-96)、Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D):1)The distribution of the college students’ character strengths; gender differences in character strengths; the differences in only child or not; and the differences between the four different departments’ students;2) The relationship between the character strengths and the mental health.The results are as following:1)For all students, the top five "signature strengths" are:love, fairness, gratitude, teamwork, integrity; the bottom five are self-regulation, love of learning, perspective, creativity and social intelligence;2) Female students were more likely than male students to report strengths of kindness, teamwork, fairness, love, appreciation of beauty and excellence,gratitude,whereas male students were more likely to report creativity and self-regulation;3) The character strengths have no difference in dimension of only kid or not;4) The differences of charcater strengths in four different deparments’ are:curiosity, self-regulation, love of learning, humility, appreciation of beauty and excellence;5) All character strengths except humility had positive correlations with life satisfaction; and love, hope,curiosity, zest, teamwork had the higest association with life satisfaction;6) All character strengths had negative correlations with depression level;and hope, teamwork, curiosity, gratitude and love have the higest negative affect with depression level.