Psychological Well-Being and Distress Among College Students: The Mediating Role of Resilience as a Dynamic Process

The collegiate mental health literature reveals a single-spectrum perspective on mental health, with studies investigating either pathology or wellness. Following a dual-continua model, this study sought to examine psychological distress and well-being concurrently, based on a sample of 5670 students recruited from a mid-sized private university in the United States. Further, informed by a dynamic-process resilience framework, we tested the mediating effects of resilience between physical exercise, sleep quality, sense of belonging, and friendship and college students’ distress and well-being. We performed structural equation modeling, which generated a statistically significant model with adequate goodness of fit. The exogenous variables, including physical exercise, sleep quality, sense of belonging, and friendship, each had a significant direct effect on well-being and distress, with small to moderate magnitude. Resilience partially mediated the effects of the exogenous variables on distress and well-being. We discussed implications of study findings for counseling practice in the college setting.