The Relationship Between College Students' Meaning In Life And Achievement Motivation

Nostalgia is a social,mixed emotion,both positive and negative characteristics,which is a positive mood for the general tone,with a stage of psychological experience.Generally,the trigger of nostalgia will be accompanied the increase of meaning in life,and the meaning in life contains two aspects.It enables individuals to have a sense of self-worth in the emotional level,while it helps individuals to define their life goals in the cognitive level,and the pursuit of success can make individuals toward the goal better.Therefore,the main purpose of this research is based on positive and negative nostalgia and its exploration stage characteristics in different event types(positive successful events,negative failed events),under the influence about different stages of nostalgia(simple/ reflect /explain nostalgia)on meaning in life and achievement motivation.On the basis of preliminary study,designed another two studies,in order to examine under the different event types,different stages of nostalgia how to influence the meaning in life and achievement motivation.In the preliminary study,through analyzing 128 college students' nostalgic text,which contain four dimensions,such as the event types,objects,time,description of nostalgic scene.The results show that the nostalgic event types basically include two kinds of positive and negative events.positive events accounted for 88.28%,and negative event is only 11.72%,which shows that in the general case,individuals are more willing to keep happy memory as a nostalgic event,positive events are the main event types to experience nostalgia.Moreover,the description of the main objects,time and scene of nostalgia are mainly about childhood,the process of getting along with family and friends.The first study adopted the event reflection task and included 2 experiments.Experiment 1 takes positive successful events and negative failed events as the main influencing factors of nostalgia,and explores whether there is a significant difference in the meaning in life under the influence of two types of events(successful events and failed events).The results showed that the main effect of event types on nostalgia was significant,and the nostalgia level of the failed event group was significantly higher than successful event group,but both groups had a higher meaning in life,namely,the nostalgia caused by the negative failed event still increased the meaningin life.In order to further explore under the influence of event types,different stages of nostalgia whether have different effects on increasing the meaning in life.The experiment 2 based on the experiment 1,experiment 2 divided nostalgia into three different stages(simple/ reflect /explain nostalgia)to explore it's influence on the meaning in life,to explore under the influence of different event types,each stage of nostalgia how to increase the meaning in life.The results show that the intensity of nostalgia increases with the deepening of the stage of nostalgia.The possession of meaning in life increases with the depth of the nostalgic stage.Research 2 added achievement motivation on the basis of experiment 2,and focused on the motivation to pursue success.While adopting the event reflection task,the subjects were required to list the important goals in their lives.In this way,under the influence of different event types,whether the nostalgia in different stages stimulates the motivation of the subjects to pursue success by increasing the meaning in life.The results show that in the successful event group :(1)search for the meaning in life plays a completely mediating role between simple nostalgia and the motivation to pursue success;(2)having the meaning in life partly mediates between reflection nostalgia and the motivation to pursue success;(3)having the meaning in life plays a completely mediating role in explaining nostalgia and the motivation to pursue success.On the other hand,in the failure event group :(1)search for meaning in life plays a completely mediating role between simple nostalgia and the motivation to pursue success;(2)search for meaning in life plays a completely mediating role in explaining nostalgia and the motivation to pursue success.This study explores the effects of different stages of nostalgia on the meaning in life and achievement motivation under the influence of positive and negative event types.The results showed that not only positive success events,but also negative failure events could induce nostalgia and increase the participants' meaning in life.Both the low-order simple nostalgia and the high-order interpretation of nostalgia will increase the meaning in life,and turn the negative failure events and experiences into positive motivation,to stimulate the motivation of the subjects to pursue success.The research results enrich the research in related fields and provide some reference for the later research.