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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cultural Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1583594
This article is part of the Research Topic Public Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health Welfare View all 18 articles
The changes, formation and public policy measures of mental health in Chinese youth
Provisionally accepted- 1 Shandong University, Jinan, China
- 2 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
Confidence is an important indicator of individuals' mental health. Taking confidence as an indicator, this paper uses CGSS2010-2021 data to analyze the latest situation, changing trend and formation mechanism of mental health in Chinese youth. The results show that firstly, Chinese young people have strong confidence in their future development in the new era, and their status expectations lean towards the upper and middle classes are dominant. Secondly, under the background of continuous economic growth and continuous improvement of objective status, youth confidence in development has not been significantly improved, but slightly decreased, resulting in a "paradox of confidence in development". Thirdly, the composition effect (the changes in formation mechanism of status expectations) caused the above paradox. The positive influence of objective social status significantly reduced, and the positive influence of income gap disappears or turns negative. Youth confidence in development no longer depends on "who I am", but more on the "macro environment". Such changes offset the gains brought by economic growth and objective status improvement, leading to a fall rather than a rise in youth confidence in development.
Keywords: Youth, Mental Health, confidence in development, change, formation mechanism
Received: 26 Feb 2025; Accepted: 01 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Tan and Tao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Zhu Tao, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, 100732, Beijing Municipality, China
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