Evidence Hub

Emotional regulation self-efficacy and impulsivity effects on college students' risk-taking behavior: a cross-sectional study

Ruoyu Zhang, Chen Zhang, Li-Ying Huang

Frontiers in Psychology, 2025

13 citations

Abstract

Background The adventurous behaviors of college students are becoming increasingly diverse. This study is grounded in the dual-process theory model of impulsivity. To explore the impact of the match between impulsivity and emotional regulation self-efficacy on college student multi-domain risk-taking behavior and examine whether impulsivity played a mediating role, using a polynomial regression and response surface analysis. Methods A questionnaire survey was conducted with 638 college students from online and offline, to investigate their impulsivity, emotional self-efficacy, multi-domain risk-taking behavior. Results (1) Impulsivity is significantly positively correlated with risk-taking behavior across various domains. Emotional self-efficacy is significantly negatively correlated with impulsivity, as well as with risk-taking behaviors in the health/safety and moral domains. (2) College students with high impulsivity and high emotional regulation self-efficacy engage in more health/safety, moral, and recreational risk-taking behaviors than those with low impulsivity and low emotional regulation self-efficacy. (3) College students with high impulsivity and low emotional regulation self-efficacy exhibit a greater number of health/safety, moral, and recreational risk-taking behaviors than those with low impulsivity and high emotional regulation self-efficacy. (4) In the male population, impulsivity plays a full mediating role between emotional regulation self-efficacy and…

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a cross-sectional, done in people. Its evidence level is 4 of 5 (Low · observational). Observational designs can show an association but not prove cause.

How the five levels of evidence work. The level is assigned automatically from the abstract and can be wrong, so check the paper.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free