The relationship between the emotional awareness expression of emotion and psychological well-being of university students: A cross cultural research

There are two aims of this research. Firs aim is to investigate the university students? psychological well-being, emotional awareness and expression of emotions if change according to gender and nation or not. Second aim is to investigate how Turkish and English university students? psychological well-being is predicted by the emotional awareness and expression of emotions. The research is a descriptive study. The Turkish group of the research was 349 (211 female, 138 male) Turkish university students educated at Gazi University in 2010-2011. The foreign students were not included in this sample. The English group was 251 (143 female, 108 male) English university students. 229 of these students were from University College of London, University of London or Middelesex University in 2010-2011; 19 of these students were participated in the online research which was addressed as www.mediko.gazi.edu.tr/survey. In order to state the emotional awareness and the expression of emotions of students, the original form of Toronto Alexithymia 20 Scale, developed by Bagby, Parker ve Taylor, (1994) and adapted to Turkish by Beştepe (1997), is applied to English group and the adapted one is used for the Turkish group. In order to state psychological well-being of students the original form of Psychological Well-being Scale, developed by Ryff (1989) and adapted to Turkish by Cenkseven (2004), is applied to English group and the adapted form is used for the Turkish group. Moreover, the information about the age, sex and ethnical structure of the students were collected via Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher. To analyze points of the differences in emotional awareness, expression of emotions and psychological well-being based on effect of country, sex and coefficient country and sex multi analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used; in order to analyze how Turkish and English university students? psychological well-being is predicted by the emotional awareness and expression of emotions in emotional awareness, regression analysis and to identify the relationship between the parameters Pearson product moment correlation coefficient were used.The results of the research showed that psychological well-being, emotional awareness and expression of emotions of Turkish university students was lower than the English students. It was found that the level of psychological well-being of the female students was higher than the male students. The emotional awareness and expression of emotions of university students did not show differences in terms of gender. The emotional awareness and expression of emotions of Turkish and English university students predicted the psychological well-being. The results were evaluated in terms of literature and institutional prospect; the suggestions were made by considering the future research and practical implication for counseling services.