Abstract
It is generally assumed that wise people know how to manage hardship and crises in life. If true, wisdom should buffer against stress among college students. Conversely, stress might adversely affect students’ wisdom by causing them to focus more on their own needs rather than other people’s perspectives, feelings, and needs. We used a short-term longitudinal survey of 216 college students to examine the relations between three-dimensional wisdom (assessed by the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, consisting of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions) and perceived stress (assessed by the Perceived Stress Scale) at the beginning and end of the semester. Paired-sample t tests indicated that, on average, perceived stress increased over time, whereas three-dimensional wisdom, and specifically the cognitive and compassionate wisdom dimensions, decreased between the beginning and end of the semester. Cross-linked autoregressive models showed a negative association between wisdom and perceived stress concurrently at the beginning and end of the semester and an inverse effect of wisdom on perceived stress longitudinally but not vice versa after controlling for baseline scores. Although some stressful experiences might lead to stress-related growth and ultimately greater wisdom in the long-term, our results suggest that stress is negatively related to the development of wisdom among college students. However, wisdom might buffer feelings of stress over time. Hence, fostering wisdom might strengthen equanimity and mental health, particularly during stressful times.
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Notes
As far as we know, there are no published results of the test-retest correlations for three-dimensional wisdom for college students. However, the analysis of a sample of 153 college students from another university show unpublished test-retest correlations from the beginning to the end of the semester (also about 3.5 months) for the 3D-WS and the cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions of wisdom of .73, .65, .71, and .77, respectively, that are similar to the test-retest correlations in the present study. These results are available upon request from the first author.
We also created interactions of the T1 variables with study year to analyze whether any of the interaction effects was significantly related to the T2 variables after controlling for baseline scores. We found significant interaction effects with year on the autoregressive effects of stress, wisdom, and the cognitive wisdom dimension, suggesting larger stability coefficients for stress, wisdom, and the cognitive wisdom dimension for students in 2014 than in 2009. Yet, all the cross-lagged coefficient estimates and respective significance remained the same. However, including the interaction effects introduced high multicollinearity to the models, even though we centered all T1 stress and wisdom variables at the mean before computing interactions to reduce multicollinearity, probably due to the small sample size in 2009 (n = 50). In addition, the models in Table 2 became unbalanced if the interaction effect was only included for the respective T2 variable for which it was significant. Because we were interested in the cross-lagged effects rather than the stability coefficients and because all of the cross-lagged coefficients remained the same, we decided not to include the significant autoregressive interaction effects with year in the models to avoid multicollinearity and an unbalanced cross-lagged design.
To make sure that we did not overlook any significant effects, we conducted additional analyses that (a) included both age and year in college and (b) replaced age with year in college in the models in Table 2. Neither age nor year in college were significantly related to any of the dependent variables in Table 2 in these additional analyses.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the following instructors for encouraging their students to participate in this study: Sarah Heidt, Tom Figurski, Lori Brown, John Koolage, Jeremy Proulx, and Joohyun Lee. We would also like to thank the journal's anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for revision. A version of this paper was presented at the 9th Biennial Meeting of the Society for the Study of Human Development in Austin, TX, October, 2015 and the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Austin, TX, June, 2016.
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Ardelt, M., Bruya, B. Three-Dimensional Wisdom and Perceived Stress among College Students. J Adult Dev 28, 93–105 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-020-09358-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-020-09358-w