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

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.

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.

Correlation analyses showed that the psychological resilience was positively correlated with prosocial behavior (r = 0.469, p < 0.001), and cognitive reappraisal was also positively correlated with prosocial behavior (r = 0.474, p < 0.001). Regression analysis indicated that psychological resilience accounted for 22.0% of the variance in prosocial behavior (R ² = 0.220, adjusted R ² = 0.218), with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.490 (t = 10.732, p < 0.001). When regressed on cognitive reappraisal, psychological resilience explained 34.4% of the variance (R ² = 0.344, adjusted R ² = 0.343), with a coefficient of 0.202 (t = 14.659, p < 0.001). The indirect effect of psychological resilience on prosocial behavior through cognitive reappraisal was estimated at 0.180 [BootSE = 0.041; 95% BootCI (0.100, 0.263)], accounting for approximately 38% of the total effect. When cognitive reappraisal was included in the model, the direct effect of resilience on prosocial behavior decreased from 0.471 to 0.292 (t = 5.596, p < 0.001), while the path from reappraisal to prosocial behavior remained significant (β = 0.214, t = 5.862, p < 0.001). The proposed model demonstrated good fit (CFI = 0.993, RMSEA = 0.044). However, comparison with competing models including a reverse-path model (Reappraisal → Resilience → Prosocial Behavior) and a common-cause model showed that all three models produced nearly identical fit indices, with indirect effect estimates of 0.180 for the proposed model and 0.183 for the reverse model. This equivalence is a mathematical consequence of the cross-sectional design and indicates that the data cannot distinguish between directional alternatives.

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.