From May 2017: 

Whether you believe the purpose of college is to foster intellectual curiosity or simply to land a job after graduation, emotional well-being is a prerequisite to both. Research links learning ability to social and emotional health, which will become increasingly important for workplace success in the coming decades.

Yet, mental health is a growing crisis within both secondary schools and universities, where demand for counseling services is rapidly outstripping supply. Given the critical importance of mental well-being for student success both in school and after, how can schools evolve to better serve students in this area?

Click here to read the full article on EdSurge.

To many, increasing automation and the unprecedented pace of technological changes mean kids need more than just academic skills to succeed. They need confidence and motivation to tackle problems, interpersonal skills to work with others and the resilience to stay on task when things fall apart.

New research from the Sutton Trust, a British foundation focused on social mobility, finds that 88% of young people, 94% of employers, and 97% of teachers say these so-called life skills are as or more important than academic qualifications. Perhaps more surprising: more than half of teachers surveyed—53%—believe these “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills are more important than academic skills to young people’s success.

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Attending university is a particularly stressful time due to unique emergent stressors such as changes in environment, loss or diminishment of social support networks, academic pressures, developing peer relationships, and financial management. There is growing recognition that these common stressors may have deleterious effects on the mental health of students. Resilience, a personality characteristic that moderates the negative effects of stress and promotes adaptation, has been associated with increased psychological well-being. Despite a growing body of research on resilience and its clinical significance in preventing mental health problems, relatively little is known about contributing factors for resilience in well-adjusted university students. This current study examined the characteristics of university students reporting high and low resilience for elucidating its clinical implications in preventing mental health problem, primarily focusing on potentially modifiable psychosocial variables. An international sample of 214 university students recruited from Australia, the United States of America, and Hong Kong universities completed measures of resilience, perceived social support, campus connectedness, and psychological distress. Results of a one-way between groups multivariate analysis of variance revealed that perceived social support, campus connectedness, and psychological distress accounted for a significant proportion (36%) of the variance between the high and low resilience groups of university students. University students with low levels of resilience reported significantly lower levels of perceived social support, campus connectedness, and higher levels of psychological distress, in comparison to university students with high levels of resilience. Findings offer important implications for the development of resilience-based interventions among university students.

Published in August 2014 in the Open Journal of Social Sciences.
Click here to read the full study.

This article presents an overview of the ability model of emotional intelligence and includes a discussion about how and why the concept became useful in both educational and workplace settings. We review the four underlying emotional abilities comprising emotional intelligence and the assessment tools that that have been developed to measure the construct. A primary goal is to provide a review of the research describing the correlates of emotional intelligence. We describe what is known about how emotionally intelligent people function both intra- and interpersonally and in both academic and workplace settings. Published in 2011 in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

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“Too many college students face challenges for which they are emotionally ill-equipped to handle. In fact, suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. In this piece, from OpEd Project’s Yale Public Voices Fellowship program, two mental health experts and program fellows explain how colleges and universities can better deal with the problem of student anxiety and depression. It was written by Diana Divecha, a developmental psychologist and research affiliate of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Robin Stern, a psychoanalyst and associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.”

Click here to read the full article.

This guide by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from 2017 provides a quick 12-page overview of bystander intervention.

Click here to view the full guide.

This guide, developed by the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE), gives tools for managing finances as a young adult, and covers issues related to checking accounts, financial aid, jobs, dorm life, apartments, information on cutting expenses, managing credit and debt and saving and investing money.

Click here to read the full guide.

This article in the Journal of American College Health, the relationships between measures of interpersonal resilience, intrapersonal resilience, and mental health were examined with respect to academic and social integration, key determinants of academic persistence.

Abstract:

Participants: A sample (n = 605) of undergraduate students was recruited from 2 midwestern universities during the 2007–2008 academic year.
Methods: Hierarchal (or sequential) regression analysis examined whether the inter- and intrapersonal resilience and mental health measures contributed to explaining variance in the response variables of university cumulative grade point average (GPA) and university sense of belonging.
Results: The intrapersonal resilience factors contributed to explaining variance in cumulative GPA in addition to aptitude and achievement. Furthermore, there was a strong statistical correlation between the inter- and intrapersonal resilience factors and mental health.
Conclusions: The demands in college are significant and there is a need for more research on the concept of resilience as it relates to college health and academic persistence.

Click here to access the full article through your institution’s subscription to Taylor and Francis Online.