Research On The Relationship Between Environmental Sensitivity And Perceived Stress Among University Students

In recent years,adolescent mental health problems have been a concern in the psychology and education fields,especially in the context of the global epidemic.In addition to academic pressure,college students at the end of adolescence also face pressures such as employment pressure and the need to take on more family responsibilities,which,together with the great changes in their living environment and ways,make them gradually become a high-risk group for mental health problems.As one of the important influencing factors of mental health,perceived stress plays a significant role in the healthy development of college students.Therefore,it is of great research value and social significance to further study the current situation of perceived stress among college students and the causes behind it.In previous studies on perceived stress,it was mostly believed that individuals are mainly influenced by the environment when facing stressful situations,and individuals are in a passive acceptance state and thus do not have subjective motivation.However,the environmental sensitivity theory proposed in recent years provides a new perspective,which believes that the environmental sensitivity characteristics of individuals and the stressful environment will jointly affect the mental health of individuals under the interaction,which provides a new research direction to solve the mental health problems of college students.At present,a large number of studies have proved that environmental sensitivity affects individuals’ psychological health,and the relationship between environmental sensitivity and perceived stress has also started to receive attention,but there are still relatively few empirical studies that can directly prove the connection between the two.At the same time,most of the previous studies on perceived stress among college students are cross-sectional studies,and there is a lack of research on perceived stress in dynamic changes.Therefore,this study first explored the cross-sectional relationship between environmental sensitivity and college students’ perceived stress through Study 1;further explored the dynamic relationship based on the life turning point environment through Study 2;and finally,investigated the mechanism of environmental sensitivity on college students’ perceived stress specifically through the experimental study of Study 3.The specific studies are as follows:(1)Study 1 examined the predictive effect of environmental sensitivity on college students’ perceived stress through a cross-sectional survey,and verified the predictive effect of each sub-dimension of environmental sensitivity separately.(2)Study 2 examined the changes of perceived stress among college students at the period of life transitions by longitudinal tracing,using the potential growth model,and selected the susceptibility dimension of environmental sensitivity to predict its dynamic development on the basis of Study1.(3)Study 3 further adopted the experimental method to examine the changes and differences in the stress indicators of subjects with different susceptibility levels before and after the experiment when they were given the same stress-inducing conditions.Based on these three studies,some final findings were obtained as follows:(1)Study 1 found that environmental sensitivity effectively predicted the perceived stress level of college students,where mainly the susceptibility dimension was playing a positive predictive role.(2)Study 2 found that freshmen’s perceived stress would show a quadratic downward trend,while the susceptibility dimension could predict the initial intercept of freshmen’s perceived stress and the slope of its subsequent change.Freshmen with higher susceptibility scores had higher initial scores of perceived stress and faster subsequent declines.(3)Study 3 found that the contingency elicitation task was effective in activating the stress response of the subjects,and although no significant differences were found between the two groups at any of the different test time points,there was a trend for the high susceptibility group to fare worse on stress self-assessment,anxiety self-assessment,positive affect,diastolic blood pressure,skin electricity,and heart rate compared to the low susceptibility group.In summary,this paper provides a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between environmental sensitivity and perceived stress among college students through the above three studies.Finally,the current situation of college students’ perceived stress and its dynamic change mechanism are revealed by combining the environmental sensitivity model.This provides new directions and guidelines for the study of college students’ perceived stress;at the same time,it puts forward some reference suggestions for solving their mental health problems and helping them grow up healthily.