Academic Stress and Health: Exploring the Moderating Role of Personality Hardiness

Attending university is a pleasurable experience for many students. Yet for others it represents a highly stressful time of extensive studying and pressure to meet the requirements of academia. Academic stress is associated with a variety of negative outcomes such as physical illness and deteriorating mental health. This paper explores the capacity of personality hardiness to buffer the relationship between academic stress and health. Results showed that hardiness was negatively associated with both academic stress and number of health complaints, and showed that hardiness moderated the association between academic stress and health.