Keywords: college students; Happiness; Student-oriented
China Library Classification Number: G642 Document Identification Number: Part A Number:1672-9749 (2012) 03-0118-04.
As an ideal state and way of existence, happiness is everyone's life goal, and it is also the pursuit and desire of contemporary college students. With the continuous progress of modern science and technology, economic growth and the continuous enrichment of material life, the loss of college students' happiness has become increasingly prominent as a social problem. Some college students are bored, distressed and bored with life, and feel unhappy. In psychological research, happiness refers to an emotional state when human beings realize that their needs have been met and their ideals have been realized. It is a complex and multi-level psychological state formed by the interaction between psychological factors such as needs (including motivation, desire and interest), cognition and emotion and external incentives, and happiness refers to the overall evaluation of the quality of life of the evaluator according to his own standards. It is considered as an important comprehensive psychological index to measure the quality of personal life. [1] It includes life satisfaction, positive emotional experience and negative emotional experience, and has the characteristics of subjectivity, integrity and stability. The factors affecting college students' happiness are extremely complicated, which can be summarized into two aspects: external objective factors and internal subjective factors. According to the research results of scholars at home and abroad, objective factors such as family environment, economic situation, life events and social support, as well as subjective factors such as individual personality traits, emotional factors, cognitive models and coping styles are all important factors affecting college students' subjective well-being.
First, the important factors affecting college students' happiness
1. The objective factors affecting college students' happiness
(1) Family environment Family is the cradle of college students' growth, and it is the place for ideological enlightenment and emotional support. Family environment has a significant impact on college students' happiness, especially the parenting style directly affects the development of children's happiness. Parents are the first teachers of the children. Parents' warm parenting style is positively related to children's happiness, while refusing to deny parenting style is negatively related to children's happiness. Parents' preferences have a great influence on children's emotional satisfaction, and mothers' personal education level and family structure affect children's happiness to varying degrees. It can be seen that the family environment has a significant impact on children's happiness. Good family environment and conditions, and reasonable parenting style are not only the direct factors that affect children's happiness, but also indirectly affect children's happiness through personality factors such as self-esteem. [2] There are also studies that show that the overall life satisfaction of college students who grew up under the democratic family rearing pattern is much higher than that of college students who grew up under the laissez-faire family rearing pattern and the indulgence family rearing pattern. [3] Obviously, a good family atmosphere helps children to experience happiness and happiness, while parents' rudeness, disharmony between parents and parents' disrespect for their children will greatly reduce college students' happiness.
(2) The relationship between economic status and happiness has always been controversial. Research shows that income is positively correlated with happiness. Accordingly, they believe that the higher the income, the higher the subjective well-being, because the higher the income, the more material enjoyment, higher power and status, and higher self-esteem and self-confidence. Some studies also believe that the relationship between income and happiness is complicated. Only when people are very poor will income have an impact. Once people's basic needs are met, the economic impact becomes very small. [4] We believe that the economic situation has a great influence on the happiness of college students, especially for poor college students. On the one hand, many college students regard the amount of money and wealth as the main criterion to measure happiness and success, and think that the more money they make, the happier they are and the greater their power. This utilitarian cognition leads to economic factors affecting college students' happiness. On the other hand, in today's colleges and universities, it is common for students to treat each other and compare with each other, which has a direct impact on the growing college students. For poor college students, this effect is particularly obvious. Some poor students have a hard life. They not only live a frugal life on campus, but also worry about their tuition and daily living expenses, and even the most basic needs are difficult to meet. In this environment, their subjective well-being is naturally low. [5]
(3) Life events Life events refer to all kinds of stress stimuli that people experience in the process of social life. Whether life events will affect college students' subjective well-being is still controversial. Yan Biaobin and others believe that life events have no significant impact on college students' subjective well-being. [6] We believe that life events will have a direct impact on college students' subjective well-being, because college students are in adolescence, their psychology has not yet reached a fully mature stage, and they are easily influenced by the outside world. Subjective well-being is a long-term and stable emotional experience. Some important life events, such as being discriminated against or wrongly blamed, failing the exam or being unsatisfactory, will cause changes in their subjective well-being. Many research results also found that important life events affect college students' subjective well-being. For example, Gan Xiong and others believe that learning pressure has a significant impact on students' personality characteristics and their happiness experience. [7] Gu Fan and other studies believe that study pressure has become the most important reason that affects poor college students' subjective well-being. In addition, interpersonal relationship is also an important influencing factor for poor college students to have negative emotions.
(4) Social support Social support is an important manifestation of individuals gaining recognition in society. People always live in a certain group and have the desire to gain recognition and support from others in the group. Therefore, social support has an important impact on people's happiness. Support from family, friends, teachers and classmates. By providing material and other substantive support or emotional support such as information help, we can increase the positive feelings of college students' sense of security, belonging and self-esteem, so that they can experience happiness and happiness more easily, especially in the face of stressful life events, and can also prevent or reduce stress reactions, thus suppressing negative emotions; On the contrary, the lack of support and recognition from family, friends, teachers and classmates will cause them to have more negative emotions, thus reducing their happiness.
2. Subjective factors affecting college students' happiness.
(1) Personality trait happiness is a subjective experience, and objective external factors often play a role through subjective processing. Personality trait is the most stable and effective factor to predict happiness, and it is also the core factor to affect subjective happiness. College students who are cheerful and emotionally stable have an objective evaluation of real life, are easy to adapt, have a positive and optimistic attitude towards life, and are more likely to form a happy experience. However, college students with unstable personalities are often anxious, sensitive, easily influenced by the external environment, and react strongly to stimuli. Compared with students with stable personalities, they are less likely to have a happy experience. Zheng Xue and others found that extroverted personality dimension was positively correlated with happiness, life satisfaction and positive emotions, and negatively correlated with negative emotions. Neuroticism is negatively correlated with happiness, life satisfaction and positive emotions, and positively correlated with negative emotions. Among them, stable extroverted personality has the highest level of subjective well-being, followed by stable introverted personality and unstable extroverted personality, and unstable introverted personality has the lowest level of happiness. They believe that extroversion, neuroticism and other personality characteristics are important factors affecting college students' happiness. [8]