Protecting the Resilient Worldview : A Study of Male and Female Post-graduate Students

The present study was meant to be an exploration of the cognitive and personality features that might affect the psychological resilience of the high functioning young population. The study examined the roles of masculinity, femininity cognitive errors and metacognition on the resilient worldview of male and female students of post-graduation, aged 21 -25 years. A total of 187 students were investigated, of which 94 were male and 93 were female. The participants were chosen from a Hindu, Bengali background and all were required to complete a personal information schedule, the Inventory of Positive Psychological Attitudes (IPPA), (Kass,1985-86), the Indian Gender Role Identity Scale (Basu, 2010), the Cognitive Error Questionnaire (Lefebvre,1981), and the Self-Assessment Questionnaire (O'Neill&Abedi, 1992). The obtained data were analyzed using parametric statistics. Results revealed that males and females did not differ significantly in their psychological resilience. The high and low resilient females differ significantly in their masculinity and certain aspects of cognitive errors and metacognition .Stepwise Multiple Regression Analysis reveals that in case of males, masculinity, overgeneralization, and awareness were found to be contributory variables in their resilience. For females, only masculinity was found to be contributory to their resilience .Psychological explanations of the above findings have been given and implications mentioned.