The Characteristic Of College Students’ Counterfactuai Thinking And Influence On Subjective Well-being

Counterfactual thinking is a common psychological phenomenon in daily life, it refers to a thinking activity which construct a possibility hypothesis after psychologically deny what happened. Currently, scholars research focuses on counterfactual thinking theory, cognitive mechanisms and their impact on the factors, but some scholars have recently begun to explore the functional role played by counterfactual thinking in positive psychology. Based on this, this study selected 350 college students as subjects, using the method of a combination of story context and questionnaires, deeply discuss the characteristic of college students’ counterfactual thinking and its influence on subjective well-being. The results show that:(1) The number of counterfactual thinking of college students has significant differences on major、gender and grade dimension. The number of counterfactual thinking of female college students is significantly more than male college students’, liberal arts students’ counterfactual thinking number is significantly more than the science students’. The number of counterfactual of freshman is significantly less than the other three. As for the Counterfactual direction of college students, there is no significant differences on grade、major and gender dimension.(2) There are mutual significant correlations among the direction of counterfactual thinking, emotion and subjective well-being. Relative the tendency for upward counterfactual thinking subjects, tend to be downward counterfactual thinking subjects was more positive emotions, but also a higher level of subjective well-being.(3) Emotion partially mediates between counterfactual thinking direction and subjective well-being, which means that counterfactual thinking direction can directly affect subjective well-being, can also indirectly affect subjective well-being by emotion.