ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Positive Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1580929
Psychological Resources for Academic Buoyancy: The Roles of Growth Mindset and Emotional Intelligence in Chinese University Students
Provisionally accepted
- Hohai University, Nanjing, China
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This mixed-methods study investigated the relationships among growth mindset (individuals' belief about the malleability of their abilities), trait emotional intelligence (EI; self-perceived emotional capabilities), resilience (the capacity to recover from adversity), and academic buoyancy (students' ability to navigate daily academic challenges) in Chinese university undergraduates.While these psychological resources are individually important in higher education, their dynamic interplay and specific mechanisms, such as the mediating role of resilience in contributing to students' capacity to manage routine academic stressors, warrant further understanding, particularly within the demanding university context. Employing a sequential explanatory design, the quantitative phase involved 381 undergraduates selected through stratified random sampling across several Chinese universities. Data were collected using established self-report instruments for each construct and subsequently analyzed via structural equation modeling (SEM) to test a mediational model. The qualitative phase explored student experiences through reflective journals guided by specific prompts and a focus group conducted using a semi-structured interview protocol, with 20 purposefully selected participants, with these data subjected to thematic analysis.Quantitative findings revealed that both growth mindset and trait EI significantly predicted resilience, which, in turn, significantly and positively predicted academic buoyancy. Resilience mediated the pathways from both growth mindset and trait EI to academic buoyancy. Multi-group analysis indicated no statistically significant gender differences in these pathways. Qualitative data richly contextualized these findings, illustrating how students practically apply growth mindset and emotional regulation to navigate academic setbacks and highlighting the crucial role of social support. These findings underscore that interventions targeting growth mindset and EI may foster resilience to enhance academic buoyancy in higher education, especially within demanding academic contexts.
Keywords: Academic buoyancy, Chinese university students, Emotional Intelligence, growth mindset, mixed methods, resilience
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 16 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ran Liu, Hohai University, Nanjing, China
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