RESEARCH ARTICLE
Mitigating Academic Distress: The Role of Psychological Capital in a Collectivistic Malaysian University Student Sample
Ryan Yumin Chua1, 2, *, Yin Lu Ng2, Miriam Sang-Ah Park1 , 3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 11
First Page: 171
Last Page: 183
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-11-171
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101811010171
Article History:
Received Date: 6/7/2018Revision Received Date: 15/9/2018
Acceptance Date: 30/9/2018
Electronic publication date: 26/10/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The emphasis of education within the collectivistic Malaysian culture has exposed Malaysian university students to high levels of academic stressors. The experience of stress that stems from the experience of such stressors can be positive (eustress) or negative (distress). However, the presence of adaptive abilities to academic stress may influence the experience of stress. The present study examines psychological capital as the adaptive ability to academic stress among a collectivistic Malaysian university student sample.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study was conducted with a total of 183 students from a university in Malaysia.
Findings:
Analyses showed that university students with high academic distress did not predict low academic performance; while, university students with high academic eustress predicted high academic performance. Psychological capital was found to mitigate the influence of academic distress on academic performance but not on the influence of academic eustress on academic performance.
Conclusion:
The study debunked the common misconceptions about academic stress. It highlighted that the experience of eustress and the presence of psychological capital may be an important resource for students’ stress coping.