Dorcas Yarn Pooi Lam

The transition to university requires students to adjust across academic, social, institutional, and personal–emotional domains. Although more studying is often assumed to support better university outcomes, less is known about how students with heavy study investment (HSI) experience this transition, especially when studying is driven by emotional demands. This study examined whether study engagement and studyholism mediate the association between emotional study demands and adaptation, and whether lecturer support moderates these pathways. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 336 university students. Structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed direct, indirect, and moderation relationships across four adaptation domains. Emotional study demands had direct negative associations with personal and academic adaptation, but not with social or institutional adaptation. However, emotional study demands were positively associated with study engagement, which was positively associated with adaptation across all four domains. By contrast, studyholism partially mediated the negative association between emotional study demands and personal adaptation. Lecturer support was positively associated with study engagement but did not moderate the relationship between emotional demands and engagement. Overall, the findings highlight the need to distinguish adaptive engagement from studyholism when supporting students’ transition to university.

Religiosity has been studied for its impact on other sociological and psychological aspects of society, particularly personal wellbeing and interpersonal relationships. However, it has yet to be studied for its impact on interreligious prejudice as measured by perceptions of interreligious threats. The present study investigates how religiosity (both positive and negative measures) affects perception of threats from other religious groups within the Malaysian context by using the Centrality of Religiosity Scale and the Inventory of Emotions towards God as measures of religiosity. Data collected through questionnaires administered to university students and recent graduates (N = 260) in Malaysia were subjected to bivariate correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis. Our findings show that the positive and negative measures yielded different effects on the perception of interreligious threats. While the centrality of religiosity and positive emotions towards God have statistically significant negative correlation with perception of interreligious threats, we show that negative emotions towards God suppresses the effect of the positive measures of religion on the dependent variable. The paper discusses the implications of these results within the socio-political context of Malaysia, in which ethnic identity and religious affiliation are closely intertwined.