Development of a Mental Health Scale for College Students

Jing Liu, Jinhong Wu, Moqian Tian, Shixiang Liu — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0800

This study explored the mental health state of college students in Beijing, utilizing previously published literature, theoretical discussion and open-ended questionnaire surveys. As a result, a formal scale is devised after three testing processes that consist of 134 items. The scale primarily consists of three subscales: adaptation, distress, and resilience. The adaptation subscale covers six points: interpersonal relationships, learning, career choice, emotions, self-adaptation, and satisfaction. The distress subscale includes seven aspects: depression, anxiety, somatization, compulsion, Internet addiction, withdrawal and aggression. The resilience subscale consists of four features: self-confidence, positive cognition, problem-solving, and social support. The results show that all three subscales have good reliability and validity. This scale covers the shortcomings of existing tools and can function as a scientific assessment tool for mental health assessment and scaling in colleges and universities.

Images That Think: Theoretical Conflicts in Cognitive Psychology

Luísa Soares, Frank Shifferdecker-Hoch, Inês Santos Silva — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0800

This paper explores the theoretical and empirical foundations of mental imagery and inductive reasoning within cognitive psychology, with a particular focus on their epistemological tensions and functional complementarities. The first part examines the longstanding debate between pictorial and propositional theories of mental representation, highlighting pivotal contributions by Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, Paivio, Shepard, and Cooper. Drawing on neuroimaging, behavioral experimentation, and computational modeling, the paper argues that mental images preserve spatial and perceptual properties and are manipulated in ways that mirror actual perception, thereby supporting the analogical view. These findings are contrasted with symbolic or propositional accounts, which emphasize the abstract, language-like structure of thought. The Kosslyn–Pylyshyn debate is analyzed as a paradigmatic conflict that shaped subsequent empirical methodologies and conceptual assumptions in the field. The second part focuses on inductive reasoning as a probabilistic, experience-driven process that underpins concept formation, categorization, and adaptive learning. The paper investigates the interplay between attention, perception, and memory in constructing conjunctive, disjunctive, and relational concepts. Inductive reasoning is shown to support decision-making in dynamic, uncertain environments through flexible cognitive strategies. Both imagery and induction are examined in their applied dimensions, ranging from clinical psychology and education to AI and neuroscience, where they inform therapeutic tools, instructional design, and cognitive modeling. Methodological insights from neuropsychology and qualitative introspection are integrated to underline the dynamic, multimodal nature of these processes. The paper concludes by proposing that imagery and inductive reasoning are not only theoretically interdependent but also crucial for advancing cognitive science and its practical applications.

Journal of Psychological Research

Development of a Mental Health Scale for College Students

Images That Think: Theoretical Conflicts in Cognitive Psychology