Healthcare students’ major selection motives and mental health: the mediating role of sense of coherence and experiential avoidance

Abstract Healthcare students face heightened mental health challenges due to their demanding education. Recent research shows that their motivations can significantly affect their resilience and mental well-being. This study investigates the relationships between Korean healthcare students’ motives for selecting their major and mental health across two studies. Study 1, involving 226 Korean dental students, explored how the motives relate to depression, with a focus on the mediating role of a sense of coherence. Study 2 expanded on these findings with a Korean sample of 371 dental and medical students, introducing experiential avoidance as a mediator and mental well-being as an outcome measure. The results reveal that a personal-intellectual development motive is linked to reduced depressive symptoms and improved well-being through an increased sense of coherence. Conversely, expectation-driven and default motives are associated with increased depressive symptoms and decreased well-being due to decreased sense of coherence and increased experiential avoidance. The humanitarian motive positively directly predicted mental well-being while the careerist-materialist motive has no significant impact. These findings underscore the importance of nurturing intrinsic motives among healthcare students. Implementing mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions that foster a sense of coherence and reduce experiential avoidance can be particularly beneficial for those with extrinsic or lacking motives.