The Relationship Between Mindfulness And Mental Health: A Mediating Model of Sense of Purpose In Life Among Graduate Students

The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between mindfulness and mental health of graduate students and the mediating effects of sense of purpose in life on mindfulness and mental health.The participants include 419 graduate students from 6 universities in China.The Hayes Process is adopted to analyze the effects of the sense of purpose in life on mindfulness and mental health of graduate students.The results reveals that mindfulness can predict the mental health of graduate students positively and signicantly.The sense of purpose in life is found to mediate the relationship between mindfulness and mental health.In further moderated mediation analyses,the effect of mindfulness on mental health can be adjusted by family economic condition.The type of degree can adjust the effect of mindfulness on sense of purpose,and professional interest can adjust the mediating effect of sense of purpose.Finally,this study discusses several empirical and methodological implications of the ndings.


Introduction
At present, mental health, as an important part of mental health,is widely recognized and highly valued by all sectors of society.To an individual,not only is it the aggregation of cognition,emotion,volition and behavior in the social environment,but also it includes the judgment of the meaning and value of the individual's life state. Mental health is a harmonious state without psychological problems,which enables individuals to effectively explore available positive forces,helping to pursue higher self-growth.Many theoretical and practical achievements have been made in previous studies of mental health of different groups.However,in the eld of higher education,the mental health of graduate students becomes severer and severer,because of the combined impact of the continuous expansion of the graduate students' enrollment and multiple pressures.

Mental health of graduate students
The graduate students are a core group for the country's development.Not only do universities continue to optimize their training model,but also they need to pay attention to students' mental health and other non- "What factors can affect mental health of graduate students?"The compensating model is usually used to explain people's mental health state,representing the compensatory activity of positive characteristics toward negative factors.According to the empirical research, a variety of positive traits can be used to inhibit the generation of negative factors.For instance,perceived social support can inhibit the production of the negative psychological characteristics of graduate students (Zhang Wenlong, 2019).The"problembased"research concept causes circumscribed and rapid educational practices,which was demonstrated in previous studies.The mental health education for graduate students should explore practical methods for human development,which is a psychological development model representing the activity of causing positive characteristics to in uence positive factors in order to achieve the self-operation of the psychological development of graduate students.Therefore,the present study will choose positive postgraduate's mental health model as the research variable to analyze.The model contains three dimensions: positive emotional experience, good psychological quality and adequate social support(O.W,G.A,2020;Liu W.L,2017).To sum up,this study takes graduate students as the research object to explore the positive psychological factors that affect the mental health of graduate students and their interaction mechanism,which has unique theoretical and practical signi cance. year.The Research has shown that mindfulness training will help people to positively promote individual mental health and working (learning) performance. People with a higher level of mindfulness will have a more clear understanding of themselves and the current environment,and will be easier to clearly discover the essence and solution of the problem in a more rational way.In summary,mindfulness can promote better development of graduate students' mental health.The present study aims to improve the mental health of graduate students by promoting graduate students' level of mindfulness,which enable them to In summary, this study constructs an intermediary model based on The Positive-Factor Model of Mental Health and the Self-decide Theory to investigate whether it is possible intermediary mechanism.It is possible that the sense of purpose in life may affect between the mindfulness and mental health of graduate students.

Method Participants
The study adopts a convenient random sampling method,and collects a total of 419 graduate students' questionnaires from 6 universities including Shaanxi University of Technology,Shaanxi University of Science and Technology,Lanzhou University of Technology,Xiangtan University, Nanjing Normal University,and Sun Yat-sen University.

Measures Postgraduate Mental Health Scale
The research selects the "Postgraduate Mental Health Scale" compiled by Liu Yilan (2020), which contains three dimensions: positive emotional experience, positive psychological quality, and well social support.The response scale ranges from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) .This instrument consists of 47 items. In the present sample,the total Cronbach α coe cient of the scale is 0.978,and the internal consistent reliability of each sub-scale is 0.936,0.961 and 0.955,which showed high reliability.

Langer Mindfulness Scale (LMS)
This study uses the Chinese version of the Langer Mindfulness Scale (LMS) developed by Alan Langer and others,translated and revised by Hu Jing and others in 2014. The LMS scale consists of 13 items, including three factors of seeking new ideas, creating new ideas and focusing.The response scale ranges from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). LMS displayed high internal consistency (Cronbach's = 0.792).The score for each item is summed to generate the total scores of mindfulness.

Life Purpose Scale
The "Life Purpose Scale" selected for the study was compiled by Lan Gongrui and others, and was continuously revised during use. It measures the two dimensions of nding a sense of purpose in life and having a sense of purpose in life through 18 items. 5 items are reversed calculation. The response scale ranges from 1 (very inappropriate) to 7 (very appropriate),the higher score means the stronger sense of purpose in life.In the present sample,the Cronbach α coe cient of the total scale and two sub-scales are 0.811,0.563, and 0.727,respectively. Procedure Data were collected from November 2020 to January 2021.Graduate students were asked to complete a series of questionnaires regarding mindfulness,mental heath and sense of purpose in life.They were informed that all responses would be con dential and would in no way impact their academic evaluation. SPSS20.0 is used to analyze the data for exploratory analysis,descriptive analysis, variation test,correlation analysis and regression analysis. The process program (Hayes) is used,and the Bootstrap method is used for the signi cance test (Bao Zhenzhou eta,2013).

Results
Hypothesis testing is carried out on the basis of the correlation of various variables,which is based on the test method of intermediary effect proposed by Wen Zhonglin and Ye Baojuan (2014),the mediating role of the sense of purpose in life between mindfulness and the mental health of graduate students is tested,and the total effect of mindfulness on the mental health of graduate students is examined.The results are shown in the Table 1.The hypothetical intermediary model does not contain "0" in the 95% con dence interval. Mindfulness can positively predict the sense of purpose in life; the sense of purpose in life can positively predict the mental health of graduate students;and mindfulness can also positively predict the mental health of graduate students.The sense of purpose in life has a signi cant mediating effect between mindfulness and the mental health of graduate students.The direct effect of specializing in the mental health of graduate students is 0.0374, the indirect effect is 0.0268×0.0561 = 0.0015; the total effect is: 0.0366; the ratio of the indirect effect to the total effect is 0.041, that is, the mindfulness of high school students has 4.1% in uence on the mental health of those through career adaptation. .000*** Further, the differences of demographic variables in each path of the model were tested. The results show those are signi cantly different in family economic status and type of degree and professional interest.The performance is that the better the family economic situation, the weaker the in uence of mindfulness on their mental health. The mindfulness of academic grads has a greater impact on their sense of purpose in life than that of professional grads. In addition, the higher professional interest of graduate students has less impact on the effect of the sense of purpose in life on mental health of graduate students.

Discussion
Mediating roles of the sense of purpose in life As is hypothesized,the present study demonstrates that mindfulness has a direct impact on the mental health of graduate students, and the sense of purpose in life has a partial mediating effect effect on concentrating and the mental health of graduate students.Mindfulness not only directly affects the mental health of graduate students, but also can further affect the mental health of graduate students through the sense of purpose in life.The intermediary model can be explained from the following perspectives: On the one hand,from the perspective of social cognition,mindfulness is the characteristics of individuals that maintain a high degree of participation and sensitivity to recognize,reconstruct and innovate and recognize in social situations. It is a mode of thinking formed by Regulating effect of demographic Variables The study found that some demographic factors have a moderating effect on the research model. The effect of mindfulness on mental health of graduate students can signi cantly be regulated by the family economic conditions,and the effect of mindfulness on mental health is the smallest and insigni cant for graduate students from richer families.This moderating effect shows that the family economic status affects the effect of mindfulness on the mental health of graduate students. In the dual-factor model of mental health,the main factor representing negative experience is depression, and family economic status is an indicator of the survival of family functions. Studies have shown that the interaction between mindfulness and family conditions can signi cantly inhibit individual depression and alleviate the damage caused by insu cient family function. The interaction also promote the acquisition of positive emotional experiences (Liu Xiaofang, 2020). In the model of this study, graduate students from poor families need more active awareness and self-adjustment to obtain positive emotional experience and good social support.On the contrary, for graduate students from wealthier families,more social support can be gotten and a wider range of sources of positive emotional experiences can be obtained. Consequently, it is not obvious to promote mental health by mindfulness. In addition, the effect that mindfulness have on the sense of purpose in life can signi cantly be adjusted by the type of degree, due to the large gap between the academic system and training methods of academic master's degree and those of professional postgraduate.Academic graduate students focus on the deep system learning of subject theory, while professional graduate students focus on the application of system theory. The differences of the two types of degree compared, the cultivation of academic master's degree is more value-oriented and requires graduate students to create new things from multiple perspectives. At the same time,there are more students to become the academic postgraduate, who are recommended and extremely interested in professional subjects or have plans for their own professional development.Their sense of purpose in life is more stable than that of professional graduate students. They have a wide range of development and they judge their own purpose in life more decisively. Finally, the effect of sense of purpose in life on the mental health of graduate students can be adjusted by the interest in the chosen major. The role of graduate students' sense of purpose in life and mental health is mainly realized through happiness brought by the sense of purpose in life and the positive experience gained in the process of actively seeking self-worth and social study. Therefore, students who choose their majors based on their professional interests have more initiative and focus in their academic development, which strengthen the sense of purpose in life and continues to give graduate students motivation and incentive to achieve higher levels of achievement (Lan Gongrui, 2017).

Declarations Data Availability Statement
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics statement
This study was approved by the ethics committee of Jiangsu Second normal University. The participants were informed about the purpose of the study and, prior to the start of the study, were assured that their privacy would be protected. An anonymous self-administered questionnaire was completed by students voluntarily. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. All methods in the current study were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

Consent for publication
Not applicable.

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Funding
The present study was supported by Shaanxi Province Education Science Research Institute, the project for"13th Five-Year Plan" , Approved in 2020[Grant number SGH20Q222].
Contributions YW analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. TT conducted the survey and collected the data. JW conducted the statistical analysis. TT conceived the study, and reviewed the manuscript. All authors approved the nal manuscript. Figure 1 The model of this study