Psychological Resilience and Academic Burnout: Serial Mediation of Cognitive Flexibility and Emotion Regulation in University Students

Abstract

University life represents a significant transitional period for an individual's academic, social, and psychological development. During this period, students face multifaceted stressors such as increasing academic demands, future uncertainty, performance pressure, and psychosocial adjustment requirements. Prolonged and intense exposure to these stressors increases the risk of academic burnout in university students, potentially leading to negative consequences not only on academic performance but also on mental health and psychological well-being. In this context, identifying the psychological processes that play a protective role against burnout emerges as an important need.This research aims not only to consider academic burnout as an outcome variable, but also to explain how psychological resilience influences academic burnout through various cognitive and emotional mechanisms. Specifically, examining cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation skills within a sequential process model in relation to the relationship between psychological resilience and academic burnout contributes to a more holistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying burnout in university students.This research was conducted within the framework of a relational survey model. The sample consisted of a total of 488 university students studying at different universities in Turkey. The sample consisted of a total of 488 university students aged between 18 and 37 years (M = 22.17, SD = 4.15), studying at different universities in Turkey. The Short Psychological Resilience Scale (Doğan, 2015), Maslach Burnout Inventory–Student Form (Çapri, Gündüz & Gökçakan, 2011), Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (Gülüm & Dağ, 2012), and Emotion Regulation Difficulty Scale–Short Form (Yiğit & Güzey-Yiğit, 2017) were used in the data collection process. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analysis were performed using IBM SPSS 25 Statistics program. To test the mediating roles of cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation in the effect of psychological resilience on academic burnout, the PROCESS Macro 4.2 (Model 6) was applied; the significance of indirect effects was evaluated with a 5000 bootstrap sample.Correlation analyses revealed that academic burnout was significantly and negatively associated with psychological resilience, cognitive flexibility, and emotion regulation skills. Similar negative associations were observed between academic competence, a sub-dimension of academic burnout, and psychological resilience, cognitive flexibility, and emotion regulation. In addition, academic insensitivity was found to be negatively related to psychological resilience, cognitive flexibility, and emotion regulation abilities. Conversely, psychological resilience showed significant positive associations with both cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation skills.Sequential mediation analyses revealed that cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation together played a significant series mediating role in the relationships between psychological resilience and academic burnout and academic incompetence. In contrast, cognitive flexibility alone did not play a significant mediating role in the dimension of academic insensitivity; however, emotion regulation played a significant mediating role in this relationship.The findings indicate that the impact of psychological resilience on academic burnout in university students occurs largely indirectly through cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation processes. These results suggest that focusing on developing cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation skills in psychological counseling and preventive mental health programs for university students could be an effective approach to reducing burnout.

Keywords: Psychological Resilience, Cognitive Flexibility, Emotion Regulation, Academic Burnout, University Students.

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007398