A Study On The Effect Of Social Support In Moderating The Consequences Of Stress Overload

Psychological stress was regarded as the "Health Epidemic of the 21st Century",chronic psychological stress is negatively related with physical health and psychological health.Most of the current studies focus on the symptoms caused by psychological stress(e.g.,anxiety and depression),and seek the method to cope with these symptoms,which cause a lack of attention for psychological stress.Therefore,the current study focuses on how to reduce the negative effect of psychological.This study is twofold:tool examination and theoretical validation.Based on the literature review of the concept,theoretical origin and measurements of psychological stress,we find the limitation of the measurements for psychological stress used in Chinese.Psychological stress occurs when individuals perceive that environmental demands tax or exceed personal resources.However,most of the stress measurements focus either on environment demands or personal resources.Especially,some stress measurements evaluate specific stress.In fact,extant stress measurement lack fidelity to stress theory,and are thus inadequate.Therefore,the current study aims to validate a stress measurement springing from stress theory.Based on the new instrument of measuring psychological and combing the reality of universal depression of college students,theoretical framework of this study was constructed.A questionnaire survey is conducted among college students,and this study examines whether social support can moderate the relationship between psychological stress and depression.Furthermore,this study explore that how social support moderate the relationship between psychological stress and depression.Finally,this study analyze some limitations and prospect of the future,and puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions for alleviating the negative effects of psychological stress.The main conclusions of the current research are as follows:(1)The results of reliability and validity test of the stress overload scale with Chinese community residents and college students provides certain support for the concept and theories for psychological stress.(2)The internal consistency co coefficient across all samples have been over 0.79,indicating that the stress overload scale possesses good reliability.(3)The two dimensions of stress overload scale are significantly related to depression,anxiety and stress symptoms(r>0.42,p<0.001),demonstrating the criterion validity of the stress overload scale.(4)The results of confirmatory factor analysis show that the fit indices of the two-factor related model are better than single-factor and second-order two-factor models,which means that the stress overload scale has good construct validity.(5)The results of multi-group confirmatory indicate that the two-factor related model is equivalent between male and female.(6)Comparing the results of exploratory structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis,we find that exploratory structural equation modeling will obtain precise factor coefficient and better fit indices.(7)The stress overload scale can screen individuals at different levels of mental health status.Individuals in the High Risk group have high level of depression and low level of wellbeing than Low Risk,Challenged,and Fragile group.(8)Social support can moderate the relationship between psychological stress measured by stress overload scale and depression.Thus,the negative effect of psychological stress on depression is reduced when individuals perceive that they had high levels of social support.(9)The types of self-esteem support and emotional support moderate the relationship between psychological stress and depression mainly through increasing psychological resources of individuals.In conclusion,this study proves that the stress overload scale has a good applicability in Chinese.Combined with the depression of individuals,this study find that perceived social support of individuals can moderate the negative effect of psychological stress for depression.However,there are some limitation of this study.First,the test-retest reliability is not evaluated.Second,the screening effect of the stress overload scale for physical symptoms is not validated.Third,in the analysis of the moderating effect of social support,the scale measures the social support from family,friends,classmates and teachers,which are emotional support.Future studies can consider material support.Finally,the social support was generated by face-to-face interaction,future studies can consider social support from network.Therefore,future studies can conduct longitudinal surveys and use experiment method to control the effect of social support.