DIGEST-Volume-10-Issue-2-FULL ISSUE

2 TPC Digest 2 | TPC Digest I n recent years, higher education personnel have noticed declines in college student emotional health and increases in stress, depression, and anxiety. These trends correspond to the millennial generation and Generation Z entering college. The counseling profession has wrestled with how best to respond to these trends, and in many cases has relied on conceptual frameworks and theories of psychosocial development created long before the emergence of the millennial generation. In the present study, the contributions to college student well-being of attachment security, ego resilience, and social support are integrated with and compared to the theory of emerging adulthood, a conceptualization of psychosocial development occurring from the late teens through the 20s for contemporary generations. A primary hypothesis of the study was that each predictor variable set would explain unique and additive variance for two characteristics of college student mental health (i.e., psychological well-being [PWB] and life satisfaction). A secondary hypothesis was that emerging adulthood identification and social media usage would predict unique variance in each outcome variable. Participants were traditional-aged undergraduate students recruited via a recruitment email sent to a sample meeting the inclusion criteria. The study sample consisted of 538 participants, with a mean age of 21.72 years ( SD = 2.05), and was predominantly female ( n = 378, 70.3%). Participation consisted of completing an online survey with several demographic questions and self-report instruments measuring the study variables. All scales demonstrated adequate reliability and validity. To test Hypothesis One, hierarchical regression analyses were conducted. Each predictor variable set predicted significant additive variance in each outcome variable after accounting for the preceding predictor variable sets in the model. The model accounted for 36% of the variance in PWB and 41% of the variance in life satisfaction. To test Hypothesis Two, semipartial correlations were examined for all variables at the last step of the hierarchical regression. Significant semipartial correlations predicting PWB included two of the four emerging adulthood variables and Facebook usage. Of the predictors of life satisfaction, significant correlations included three of the four emerging adulthood variables and Facebook usage. The emerging adulthood and Facebook variables accounted for 7.4% of unique variance in PWB and 7.1% of unique variance in life satisfaction. C ounselors are encouraged to utilize emerging adulthood theory with their clients. It is also important to continue exploring the potential therapeutic applications of social media and other forms of technology. Such programs might be especially useful in today’s higher education climate in which symptom severity seems to be increasing while budgetary resources for college counseling centers are often stagnant or decreasing. Joel A. Lane, PhD, NCC, LPC, is an associate professor and department chair at Portland State University. Correspondence may be addressed to Joel Lane, 250G Fourth Avenue Building, 1900 SW 4th Ave., Portland, OR 97201, lanejoel@pdx.edu. Joel A. Lane Attachment, Ego Resilience, Emerging Adulthood, Social Resources, and Well-Being Among Traditional-Aged College Students