{"title":"The relationship between academic passions and critical thinking in a Chinese college student sample: a latent profile analysis.","authors":"Shaojie Wang, Xizhen Fan, Hao Yu, Xing Yan, Jianmei Wang, Ying Liu, Yue Li","doi":"10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1513286","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Academic passions, including harmonious and obsessive passions, play a significant role in academic life by influencing students' motivation, engagement, and overall academic success. Critical thinking is essential in education as it helps individuals assess, evaluate, and make informed decisions based on reasoning, which is crucial for academic growth and lifelong learning. Given the increasing emphasis on developing critical thinking skills in education, it is crucial to investigate how academic passions influence this cognitive process in the Chinese context.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>A total of 698 valid questionnaires were collected from college students from Guangdong and Hunan provinces in China. This study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to investigate the profiles of harmonious and obsessive passions. Then it tested differences in critical thinking based on the profiles of harmonious and obsessive passions.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Three latent profiles for two academic passions were identified: low, medium, and high. Respondents in the high harmonious and obsessive passion profiles exhibited the significantly highest critical thinking abilities.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>The results confirm the heterogeneity of harmonious and obsessive passions. Students with higher levels of academic passions demonstrate enhanced critical thinking abilities compared to their peers. This study suggests that educators should pay attention to students' academic passions when cultivating their critical thinking skills. This study offers several implications for practice. First, colleges should provide targeted counseling and guidance based on the types of students' passion. Second, it is necessary to balance the relationship between harmonious and obsessive passions to promote students' mental health and academic persistence. Third, colleges should help students develop harmonious passion, thereby improving their critical thinking ability.</p>","PeriodicalId":12525,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Psychology","volume":"16 ","pages":"1513286"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11821947/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Frontiers in Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1513286","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background: Academic passions, including harmonious and obsessive passions, play a significant role in academic life by influencing students' motivation, engagement, and overall academic success. Critical thinking is essential in education as it helps individuals assess, evaluate, and make informed decisions based on reasoning, which is crucial for academic growth and lifelong learning. Given the increasing emphasis on developing critical thinking skills in education, it is crucial to investigate how academic passions influence this cognitive process in the Chinese context.
Methods: A total of 698 valid questionnaires were collected from college students from Guangdong and Hunan provinces in China. This study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to investigate the profiles of harmonious and obsessive passions. Then it tested differences in critical thinking based on the profiles of harmonious and obsessive passions.
Results: Three latent profiles for two academic passions were identified: low, medium, and high. Respondents in the high harmonious and obsessive passion profiles exhibited the significantly highest critical thinking abilities.
Conclusion: The results confirm the heterogeneity of harmonious and obsessive passions. Students with higher levels of academic passions demonstrate enhanced critical thinking abilities compared to their peers. This study suggests that educators should pay attention to students' academic passions when cultivating their critical thinking skills. This study offers several implications for practice. First, colleges should provide targeted counseling and guidance based on the types of students' passion. Second, it is necessary to balance the relationship between harmonious and obsessive passions to promote students' mental health and academic persistence. Third, colleges should help students develop harmonious passion, thereby improving their critical thinking ability.
期刊介绍：
Frontiers in Psychology is the largest journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across the psychological sciences, from clinical research to cognitive science, from perception to consciousness, from imaging studies to human factors, and from animal cognition to social psychology. Field Chief Editor Axel Cleeremans at the Free University of Brussels is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating scientific knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, clinicians and the public worldwide. The journal publishes the best research across the entire field of psychology. Today, psychological science is becoming increasingly important at all levels of society, from the treatment of clinical disorders to our basic understanding of how the mind works. It is highly interdisciplinary, borrowing questions from philosophy, methods from neuroscience and insights from clinical practice - all in the goal of furthering our grasp of human nature and society, as well as our ability to develop new intervention methods.
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