Perceived Stress, Positive-Negative Emotions, Personal Values and Perceived Social Support in Malaysian Undergraduate Students

The purpose of this research was to examine the perceived stress, emotion regulation, positive-negative emotions, personal values and perceived social support and also to investigate the effects of gender, ethnicity and religion on these constructs. Participants were 308 students from a public university in Malaysia. A demographic questionnaire and four self-report inventories were used in this study. Results showed that perceived stress and its subscales had significantly positive correlations with both positive and negative emotions. The perceived stress and negative life events hassles had significantly negative relationships with personal values and its subscales. Even so, there are significant negative relationships between the perceived stress and personal hassles with perceived social support and its family and friend subscales. Findings rejected the effects of gender and marital status in perceived stress but affirmed the roles of religion and ethnicity on it. The negative emotions and perceived social support explained 37 and 39 percents of the perceived stress variation in total sample and females respectively, and negative emotions explained 48 percent of perceived stress among males.