Alienation and Psychological Wellbeing: Moderation by Resilience

This study adopted the radical perspective of perceived alienation in interpersonal, political and socio-economic domains of life and examined their relationships to psychological wellbeing. The moderator role of resilience on the relationship of the three facets of alienation and psychological wellbeing was also investigated. Psychological wellbeing was conceptualized as self-report of psychological distress. Participants were 337 undergraduate students (164 males, 173 females; M-age = 23.42, SD = 3.70) who are indigenous young adults of the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Pearson's correlations and multiple regression analysis were used to analyse the data. Results showed that interpersonal alienation, political alienation and socio-economic alienation were positively associated with psychological distress while resilience was negatively related to psychological distress. Psychological distress was also predicted by alienation and resilience. Resilience neither moderated the relationship of interpersonal alienation and psychological distress nor political alienation and psychological distress but the relationship between socio-economic alienation and psychological distress was moderated by resilience. It was concluded that initiation of resilience building programmes as a form of cognitive-behavioural and existential interventions may buffer the negative relationship of alienation to psychological distress.