| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 臨床心理學系碩士班 === 106 === With the coming of post-industrial society, individuals are delaying the completion of their studies, marriage, and childbirth. Individuals over the age of 18 but not under the age of 30 are no longer adolescence, but do not feel that they are already independent adults. This stage is named emerging adulthood, in which identity exploration is one of the important features of this period (Arnett, 2000, 2004, 2014). Although identity exploration is important for the formation of stable identity statuses (Berzonsky, 2004), past studies have shown that the correlation between identity exploration and mental adjustment mostly falls into low correlation. Therefore, the positive/negative thinking has important and direct predictive power for mental adjustment (Lightsey, 1994). Present study believes that the identity exploration has not been effective to predict mental adjustment but may play a moderating role between positive/negative thinking and mental adjustment.
The purpose of present study is to focus on the relations among the positive/negative thinking, identity exploration, and mental adjustment in emerging adulthood, and to examine whether identity exploration could be a moderator between the positive/negative thinking and mental adjustment. This study tries to elucidate positive/negative thinking and identity exploration (i. e., exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration) for indices of positive /negative mental adjustment (i. e., life satisfaction, depression and anxiety) respectively.
In this study, the online questionnaire was used. According to the definition of emerging adulthood and reference to the average age of first marriage and childbirth in Taiwan, we defined individuals aged 18 to 30 (N = 313, male= 82, female= 231) were the sample of emerging adults. Research instruments included the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, the Identity Exploration Questionnaire, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the Depression and Anxiety Questionnaire of Symptom Checklist-90-Revised.
The results of this study shows that after excluding control variables (gender, age, education, marital status, occupational status, and subjectively perceived life stages), positive thinking was a better predictor of emerging adults’ life satisfaction whereas negative thinking could predict emerging adults’ depression and anxiety more successfully. Moreover, exploration in breadth and exploration in depth moderate the relation of positive/negative thinking and positive/negative mental adjustment. Exploration in depth not only weakens the protective effect of positive thinking on depression and anxiety but also strengthens the adverse impact of negative thinking on life satisfaction, and exploration in breadth buffers the adverse impact of negative thinking on depression. Present study implies that positive/negative thinking seem to play an important role in emerging adults’ mental adjustment, but identity exploration does not. Although identity exploration disturbs the prediction of positive/negative thinking on mental adjustment, it is still one of the important features of emerging adulthood. This implies that the issue how emerging adults can keep well mental adjustment when exploring identity is worthwhile to study.
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