The Effects of Covitality on Well-Being and Depression in Australian High School Adolescents

Abstract

Positive psychology is an area of increasing interest in psychological research, with studies generally focusing an individual's strengths rather than their psychopathology. Within positive psychology, co-vitality is a new area of study that relates to the co-occurrence of human strengths. This study examined the construct of co-vitality, using the SocialEmotional Health Scale-Secondary (SEHS-S), in a population of Australian adolescents examining relationships between its four underpinning constructs (Belief-in-Self, Belief-inOthers, Emotional Competence, and Engaged Living), psychological well-being, and depression. Three hundred and sixty-one adolescents completed the SEHS-S with results demonstrating high correlations between all constructs examined. The results demonstrated that covitality predicted both well-being and depression. However, the combined effect of these constructs, co-vitality, was found to be a stronger predictor of psychological wellbeing and depression than the unique variance of any of the SEHS-S individual constructs. This suggests that building only one psychological strength, such as belief-in-self, might not be enough to strengthen wellbeing, or lessen depressive tendencies, in adolescents. In conclusion, it is considered that a broad range of constructs, such as those that underpin the SEHS-S, should be considered in high school intervention programs with adolescents.

Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (SEHS-S): A Universal Screening Measure of Social-Emotional Strengths for Spanish-Speaking Adolescents

“…Concerning the four second-order factors, our data showed correlations between 0.35 and 0.56. In fact, we found the similar lowest intercorrelations (r = 0.35) between emotional competence and engaged living as in previous studies (r = 0.25 to 0.63) and the similar highest one (r = 0.56) for belief in self and engaged living (r = 44 to 72) [21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…Lastly, the correlations between the four factors and the Covitality total score in our S2 were consistent (r = 0.65 to 0.83) with previous studies (r = 0.62 to 0.83), with the highest one found for Engaged living (our sample: r = 0.83; previous studies: r = 0.76 to 0.83) and the lowest one found for Emotional Competence with Covitality (our sample: r = 0.65, previous studies: r = 0.62 to 0.66) [21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…Some previous studies have reported intercorrelations between SEHS-S subscales [21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. The lowest intercorrelations between the four second-order factors were found for the association between emotional competence and engaged living (0.25-0.63) and the highest one for belief-in-self and engaged living (0.44-0.72).…”

Social-Emotional Health and Psychological Well-Being among Church School Students

“…Students respond to each of 36 items using a 4point Likert Scale. Previous studies have supported good psychometric quality of SEHS-S, internal consistency has been consistent You et al, 2013;Boman et al, 2017;Timofejova et al, 2016;Radnoti, 2016;Gajdošová et al, 2018). The internal consistency of SEHS-S questionnaire within our research group is at high level of Crombach alpha for a total score across items α=.852, for main domains belief in self α=.747, belief in others α=.760, emotional competences α=.770, and engaged living α=.834.…”

“…The aim of our research was to find the relationships between the socialemotional health and psychological well-being among church school students at the level of covitality, domains (VO1) and psychological indicators (VO2). We gathered evidence for empirical support for the hypothesis (H1) about the positive relationship between covitality and psychological well-being Boman et al, 2017;Telef & Furlong, 2017) , as well as for hypothesis about the different level of social-emotional health among males and females (H2) (Furlong et al, 2014;Radnoti, 2016). We tried to identify the most significant model which explains the most percent variability of covitality (VO3).…”