Does fear of terrorism influence psychological adjustment of academic sojourners in Pakistan? Role of state negative affect and emotional support

Abstract

This study adopted the psychological and emotional perspective of terrorism and the way it influences the psychological adjustment of international students in Pakistan. We investigated the effect of fear of terrorism, state negative affect, and emotional support on students’ psychological distress. Low psychological distress represented higher levels of psychological adjustment. Data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire from 121 internationals students of 18 different countries enrolled in a public university of Lahore city with a mean age of 21.7 years. A two-stage analysis was conducted by variance-based structural equation modeling technique in SMART PLS 3.2 software. Adequate convergent and discriminant validity of the latent constructs were ensured, and no evidence was found for common method bias. The results of structural model revealed that fear of terrorism is a positive and significant predictor of student's psychological distress, which is fully mediated by state negative affect. Emotional support was negatively related to psychological distress and moderated the relationship between state negative affect and psychological distress. Conditional process modeling using process macro revealed that emotional support also moderated the indirect effect of fear of terrorism on distress mediated by negative affect. A significant contribution of this research is to investigate fear of terrorism as a stressor in international student's acculturation research. Negative emotional state plays an intermediary role in relating fear with psychological wellbeing of international students while emotional support can be a potent coping resource. Several implications, limitation and future research recommendations are also discussed.