Abstract
With growing involution in contemporary China, academic stress and sleep quality have become two noticeable issues among Chinese college students. Amid this background, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between academic stress and sleep quality, and the potential mediating mechanisms and antecedents to this relationship. First, we developed a Perceived Academic Stress Scale for Chinese Undergraduate Students (PASSCUS) in the pilot study. Demonstrating satisfactory psychometric quality, this scale effectively distinguishes between academic stress caused by the (lasting) education involution and that caused by (episodic) academic workload. In the main study, we tested an integrated theoretical model on the relationship between perceived academic stress (using PASSCUS) and sleep quality to understand the mediating mechanism through which academic stress predicts sleep quality among a convenient sample of 466 participants. Consistent with our expectations, we found that academic stress predicted social comparison, which predicted bedtime procrastination, which further predicted worse sleep quality. Furthermore, our hypotheses were also supported that cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression emotion regulation strategies contributed to academic stress. Whereas cognitive reappraisal negatively predicted perceived academic stress, expressive suppression positively predicted perceived academic stress. Additionally, the relationship between expressive suppression and perceived lasting academic stress was stronger than that between expressive suppression and episodic academic stress. Taken together, this study introduces PASSCUS as a valuable tool for distinguishing between types of academic stress while also elucidating the specific pathways through which these stress types impact sleep quality. Moreover, our findings pointed to the potential for reducing college students’ problems of academic stress and sleep quality by improving emotion regulation.
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This study is supported and funded by the 18th round Undergraduate Research Awards of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
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Cong, T., Kuang, Y., Bao, Y. et al. Effects of perceived academic stress on sleep quality among Chinese college students: mediating effects of social comparison, bedtime procrastination, and the protective role of emotion regulation. Curr Psychol 43, 31327–31342 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06707-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06707-w