The Relationship Between Mental Toughness with Health-Oriented Academic Lifestyle in Gifted Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Achievement Emotions and Coping Styles

This study examined the mediating effect of cognitive coping strategies and achievement emotions on the relationship between mental toughness and academic lifestyle behaviors among male and female gifted students. In this correlational study, 288 gifted students (141 male and 147 female) responded to the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Revised (Garenofski & Kraaij, 2006), the Health-oriented Academic life-style Questionnaire (Salehzadeh, Shokri & Fathabadi, 2017a), the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Revised (Abdollahpour, 2015) and Mental Toughness Questionnaire-Revised (Wagnall, Donovan, Papa Georgiou, Clough, Parker & Drinkwater, 2019). Structural equation modeling was used to assess the proposed gifted students. Results indicated that for gifted students, the partially mediated model of adaptive and nonadaptive cognitive coping strategies and positive and negative achievement emotions on the relationship between mental toughness academic lifestyle behaviors had good fit to data. Furthermore, all of the regression weights in the hypothesized model were statistically significant and model' predictors accounted for 66% and 61% of the variance in inhibitory and facilitator behaviors, respectively. Therefore, the most important idea derived from the findings of the present study is how educational professionals interested in the field of gifted psychology studies can pursue concerns related to the motivational profile analysis of gifted learners by emphasizing the information power of the emerging positive psychology movement.