Abstract

The purposes of this study was to investigate how individuals’ stress-coping strategies and emotion-regulation abilities mediate the relationship between character strengths and adjustment to college life. The character strength of interest was the virtue of temperance, which in this study was operationalized to include two constructs: self-regulation and prudence. A sample of 642 college students completed the Character Strength Test, Student Adjustment to College Questionnaire, Ways of Coping Checklist, and Emotion Regulation Checklist. We conducted multiple regression analyses on measures of self-regulation and prudence as independent variables, stress-coping strategies and emotional regulation as the mediation variables, and adjustment to college life as the dependent variable, examining whether stepwise regression models accounted for more variance than did linear ones. Our results suggest that emotional regulation and stress-coping strategies partially mediate the relationship between self-regulation and adjustment to college life. They also partially mediate the relationship between prudence and adjustment to college life. Despite these findings, our study is not without limitations. We discuss these in detail and provide directions for future research. (Korean J Str Res 2015;23:109∼118)

• Keywords: Character strengths, Self-regulation, Prudence, Stress-coping strategies, Emotion-regulation;