Understanding the Relationship between Optimistic Personality and Anxiety among College Students: The Mediating Role of Coping Style

Stressors like academic tasks, job hunting, and interpersonal interaction are exerting great pressure on Chinese senior college students that may further elicit anxiety (1). Studies that focused on influencing factors of anxiety suggested that optimism could inspire individuals to pay more efforts to deal with emotional problems and in turn reduce negative psychological reactions such as anxiety (2-4). Furthermore, optimistic ones tend to take a positive attitude to face stressors and to accept the aftereffects brought by; hence, they may relieve anxiety by utilizing positive coping strategies to handle negative consequences (5). However, the presumption has not been evaluated by empirical studies. To examine it, we proposed that optimistic personality could relieve anxiety through positive coping style as a mediator. Totally, 213 college senior students were randomly selected in Mar. 2014 from Anhui Normal University in Anhui Province, China. These participants were 22-26 yr of age (SD=1.16) with a range from 19 to 27 yr old; 91 (42.7%) were boys. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Beijing Normal University and the principals of the participating schools. This study revised the life oriented questionnaire (6), and the internal reliability for that, was acceptable (α = 0.68). This study revised the coping style questionnaire (7). Based on our need, the subscale of positive coping was chosen, and its reliability was 0.75. The self-reported anxiety scale developed (8) was used to assess the anxiety level of college senior students, and it had an adequate reliability (α = 0.85). Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations were conducted for main measures. As shown in Table 1, optimistic personality was positively associated with positive coping style, but negatively associated with anxiety; correlation between positive coping style and anxiety was significantly negative.