| Significance and objectiveLife meaning is an important factor of individual’s mental health, which can make positive influence on almost every aspect of life. Plenty of studies have demonstrated the positive relevance of life meaning to mental health. For example, people with higher life meaning have lower levels of psychopathology and better response to therapy, lower levels of anxiety, fear, depression and suicide idea, as well as posttraumatic stress and experiential avoidance, because they have better coping capacity with negative life events. However, according to domestic research, no more than 30% of college students in China have clear life meaning. Therefore, how to improve people’s life meaning is an important subject.Only few domestic studies paid attention to improving life meaning. Some frequently used methods to cultivate life meaning have been described in domestic studies:meaning-centered group psychotherapy, life education, and the meaning-centered counseling and therapy. All these methods seek to help people find their life meaning through exploring what is important to them and mobilize life meaning as a coping resource. Although encouraging results have been reported in theory studies, data on the interventions is scarce, especially data on improving life meaning of college students, which only 13 papers could be found in CNKI. Though the widely used interventions have been proved useful by different studies, there are some limitations in existing interventions. First, most of them need great efforts to design content or process and a leader to provide whole-process guidance, so the capacity of leader and the design of intervention will directly influence the outcome of intervention. Secondly, all the interventions take extra time during class or after class, which cost at least one hour, and both subject and leader should entirely involve, it lead to a waste of time and manpower. Thirdly, most of the interventions need to gather the students together more than once, which always turns out to be difficult, and the group form means individual difference couldn’t be taken into consideration properly. At last, all the interventions are disjointed from daily life, so after the class over or the group comes to end, the effects start to fade away, which have been proven by previous studies.Auto-photography is a novel and unique intervention which not wholly dependent on language and enable people to intuitively explore meaning in their lives. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated in a pilot study even though the subjects were not students with low level of life meaning. So if we reform the Auto-photography method into a strict operation paradigm and apply this novel paradigm to students with low level of life meaning, a more significant effect might be observed.This study was to pioneer a simple, convenient and personalized life meaning improving method which could be integrated into daily life, and to explore its effects and mechanism, so as to help college students finding their personal life meaning and live a valuable life.Methods and SubjectsCluster sampling method was used to build up research pool and 900 questionnaires were sent out. The subjects were recruited according to two standards: ① Total score ranked 27% of bottom. ② Volunteered to take part. Finally,80 subjects were involved and were randomly and equally assigned into experimental group and controlled group. Totally,32 subjects in experimental group (11 men and 21 women) and 26 subjects in controlled group (6 man and 20 women) participated whole experiment. Their average age was 19.79±1.30 years old, and all the subjects were right-handed and had normal vision.We conducted a random, single-bland parallel study in which nether group of subjects know the real aim of experiment. First, a pretest was conducted to both two groups. Then, subjects in experimental group were asked to take 5-7 photographs of "things that make your life meaningful" per week, and sent a feedback to experimenter on Sunday. The experiment lasted 3 weeks and during which the control group were left intact. When experiment come to end, a posttest was conducted to both two groups, in addition, a interview was conducted to subject in experimental group.Pretest and posttest included Meaningful Life Measure, the two-item Patient Health Questionnaire, Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule and an attention bias test created using E-prim 1.1.SPSS 20.0 was used to do independent sample T-test, paired sample T-test and correlation. Categorization and contextualization were used for interview data analysis in order to explore further the effects of Meaningful-Photographic method.Results1. After intervention, total score and factor scores of MLM were significantly increased while depressive level were significantly decreased in experimental group subjects; Meanwhile, there were no difference in controlled group except the decreased of Value of Life factor score of MLM.2. The result of interview showed that the effect score ranked by subjects of experimental group was 5.73±1.70, with 8 being the highest score and 1 being the lowest score. All the subjects considered Meaningful-Photographic method had positive effects on life except two subject considered it unhelpful. We summarized the effects into 3 themes and 6 sub-themes:Affect (affection adjustment, affection release), cognition (resource discovery, selective memory) and motivation (feeling of purpose, personal reflection). Most of subject started to notice the effect of intervention when doing first week’s feedback, and all the subjects prone to think three weeks intervention was better than two weeks or one week.16 subjects said they would keep taking meaningful-photography even though the intervention was end,8 subjects said they were not certainly know if they would keep on or not, and 6 subjects said they won’t keep doing it.3. In pretest, when negative and positive pictures were presented together, both experimental and controlled group subjects were sensitive to negative pictures; when positive and neutral pictures were presented together, both experimental and controlled group subjects were avoid positive pictures; when negative and neutral pictures were presented together, both experimental and controlled group subjects were sensitive to negative pictures. But in posttest, the attention of experimental group subjects was shifted to neutral or positive pictures while the attention of controlled group subjects still stick on negative pictures.4. After intervention, positive affect was significantly increased and negative affect was significantly decreased in experimental group subjects compared to pretest, while no significant difference was found in controlled group subjects.5. MLM total score was significantly correlated with attention bias and affection. MLM total score was negative correlated with positive-negative attention bias score (r=-0.35, P=0.00),which indicated that when positive and negative pictures were presented together, subject with high MLM score tend to notice positive picture, and subject with low MLM score tend to notice negative picture; MLM total score was positive correlated with positive-neutral attention bias score (r=0.35, P=0.00),which indicated that when positive and neutral pictures were presented together, subject with high MLM score tend to notice positive picture, and subject with low MLM score tend to notice neutral picture; MLM total score was negative correlated with negative-neutral attention bias score (r=-0.45, P=0.00),which indicated that when negative and neutral pictures were presented together, subject with high MLM score tend to notice neutral picture, and subject with low MLM score tend to notice negative picture; MLM total score was positive correlated with positive affect (r=0.42, P=0.00),which indicated that subjects with more positive affect tend to have higher MLM total score; MLM total score was negative correlated with negative affect (r=-0.37, P=0.00),which indicated that subjects with more negative affect tend to have lower MLM total score;Conclusion1. Meaningful-Photographic method could significantly improve life meaning in college students.2. College students with low level of life meaning tend to avoid positive resource and notice negative resource.3. The effect mechanism of Meaning-Photographic method maybe related to attention bias and affect. |
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