The indirect association between psychological resilience and prosocial behavior through cognitive reappraisal in Chinese college students.

Introduction: Psychological resilience is commonly defined as an individual's capacity to maintain stability and engage in constructive adaptation in the face of adversity, and its role in promoting positive developmental outcomes among college students has received increasing attention. Individuals with higher levels of resilience tend to exhibit more balanced emotional responses under stress, which may in turn facilitate their involvement in prosocial actions such as helping, comforting, cooperating, sharing, and donating. Cognitive reappraisal-the cognitive reframing of potentially stressful situations-is believed to further reinforce this adaptive response by mitigating the adverse effects of stress. However, the structural nature of the interrelations among psychological resilience, cognitive reappraisal, and prosocial behavior remains insufficiently understood, particularly regarding whether cognitive reappraisal accounts for part of the resilience-prosocial behavior association in cross-sectional data. The present study, therefore, aimed to examine the statistical dependencies among these variables based on cross-sectional survey data, with a view to providing empirically grounded references for psychological health education among college students. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was administered to 411 college students recruited from eight universities across four cities in Guizhou Province, China. Participants completed three self-report instruments: the Psychological Resilience Questionnaire (CD-RISC), the Prosocial Behavior Tendency Questionnaire for College Students (PTM), and the Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire (ERQ). All measures have been previously validated in Chinese samples. Data were analyzed using SPSS 22.0. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to examine bivariate associations among the variables. To estimate the statistical indirect effect, the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Model 4; Hayes et al., 2018) was used with 5,000 bootstrap resamples to generate bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals. Model fit for the proposed structure was evaluated using structural equation modeling in AMOS. In addition, three competing models the proposed model, a reverse-path model, and a common-cause model were compared to assess the extent to which the cross-sectional data could distinguish between alternative directional explanations. Results: Correlation analyses showed that the psychological resilience was positively correlated with prosocial behavior ( Discussion: In the current college student sample, both psychological resilience and cognitive reappraisal were positively correlated with prosocial behavior, and cognitive reappraisal accounted for a portion of the statistical effect underlying the psychological resilience-prosocial behavior association within the same cross-sectional data. This finding suggests the presence of statistical conditional dependencies among resilience, emotion regulation strategies, and prosocial tendencies; however, the nature of these interrelations should be interpreted with caution, given the cross-sectional design of the present study.