Correlates of psychological mindedness

Abstract

Levels of psychological mindedness, mental well-being, and self-consciousness of 89 students of a small liberal arts college were examined. Psychological mindedness, the awareness of one's and others' thoughts, feelings, and motives, is a recently studied phenomenon. The main hypothesis was that there is a positive linear correlation between psychological mindedness, as measured by the Psychological Mindedness Scale (Conte, Plutchik, Jung & Picard, Comprehensive Psychiatry, 31, 426–431, 1990), and mental well-being, as measured by the Happy Scale (Ryff, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069–1081, 1989). This hypothesis was supported ( P < 0.01). As expected, there was also a positive linear correlation between self-consciousness, as measured by the Private Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier & Buss, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522–527, 1975), and psychological mindedness ( P < 0.01). A multiple regression indicated that as psychological mindedness increases, the level of mental well-being increases, and the level of self-consciousness decreases. In addition, psychology students were found to be significantly more psychologically minded than other social science students ( P = 0.05) and more self-conscious than humanities students and science students ( P < 0.01). Though psychological mindedness varied with major, it was found to transcend both class year and gender.