The College of Education announces the final Dissertation of

Ben Smith

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 1, 2017 at 10:00 am in 103 Ball Hall

Major Advisor: Owen Richard Lightsey, PhD

RESILIENCY, GENERALIZED SELF-EFFICACY AND MINDFULNESS AS MODERATORS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRESS AND BOTH LIFE SATISFACTION AND DEPRESSION AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RESILIENCE PROCESS

ABSTRACT: The overall purpose of this dissertation was to add to the knowledge base regarding resilience processes. It was hypothesized that (1a) GSE, mindfulness and resiliency would all uniquely predict lower depression and higher life-satisfaction; (1b) resiliency would be a stronger predictor of these outcomes than both mindfulness and GSE; and (2) resiliency would uniquely buffer the relationship between stress and both depression and life satisfaction such that, after controlling for both the mindfulness x stress interaction and the GSE x stress interaction, at higher levels of resiliency, stress would have a weaker relationship to depression and life satisfaction. It was hypothesized that (3) there would be a bidirectional relationship between resiliency and both GSE and mindfulness. All hypotheses were investigated utilizing hierarchical multiple regression. With regard to depression, Hypotheses 1a, 1b and 2 were not supported. Regarding life-satisfaction, the results differed by gender. GSE directly predicted higher life satisfaction among women. Hypothesis 2 was not supported among women. Among men, higher levels of GSE exacerbated the inverse relationship between perceived general stress and future life satisfaction, and resiliency exacerbated the inverse relationship between general stress and life satisfaction. Hypothesis 3 was not supported. However, also among men, mindfulness buffered the relationship between stress and life satisfaction. For higher levels of mindfulness, increasing life event stress was less strongly related to lower life satisfaction. A possible contributor to the unexpected nature of these findings could be the small and possibly unrepresentative sample, which should be considerations for future studies.