Emotion malleability beliefs and coping with the college transition.

Abstract

First-year students navigating the transition to undergraduate life experience an increase in psychopathology, yet some students thrive while others struggle. The current study examined whether first-year students' beliefs about emotion's malleability predicted emotion regulation and mental health during this critical period. First-year college students completed a battery of self-report questionnaires at the beginning and end of the fall semester. Students who held more malleable views of emotion at the semester's onset reported more of a decrease in depression, more of an increase in the use of cognitive reappraisal, and decreased reliance on rumination as emotion regulation strategies during the fall semester. As hypothesized, emotion regulation played a significant role linking emotion malleability beliefs to depression. Students' beliefs that emotions were more malleable at the beginning of the semester predicted less depression at the end of the semester through greater use of cognitive reappraisal and less use of rumination. These results suggest that emotion malleability beliefs are systematically related to emotion regulation and mental health adjustment during this stressful transition and could be targets for intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).