Stress mindset and mental health status among Chinese high school students: The mediating role of exam stress appraisals

Exam stress is one of the main stressors for adolescents, which can trigger severe mental health problems and performance decline. As an alterable individual variable that influences stress consequences, stress mindset has attracted academic attention recently. However, the relationship between stress mindset and adolescents' responses toward exams has not been fully understood. This study aimed to investigate whether stress mindset affected pre-exam mental health status and exam performance, and whether appraisals of exam mediated such influence. We collected stress mindset, threat and challenge appraisals, pre-exam mental health status, and exam scores from 185 Chinese 11th-grade students. All of them would take an important and unified exam organized on the school level. Results showed that the stress-is-enhancing mindset negatively predicted students' symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, but had no direct effect on performance. Further mediation analysis showed that stress-is-enhancing mindset was positively associated with the challenging appraisal and was negatively associated with the threat appraisal, thus having better health status (including fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress) and performance. These results suggest that the stress mindset had an association with students' response toward exams, and how they appraised the upcoming exam would be an important indirect pathway. Future studies may benefit from changing students' mindsets to protect them from negative consequences of exam stress.