The relationship between social support and lying flat among Chinese university students: the chain mediation roles of meaning in life and psychological resilience

BACKGROUND: "Lying flat" has emerged in recent years as a widely discussed sociocultural phenomenon in China, garnering significant attention across various sectors of Chinese society. Lying flat has become a representative psychological and behavioral phenomenon among Chinese university students, yet its underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently examined. Existing research suggests that social support, meaning in life, and psychological resilience may play key roles, but integrative frameworks are still scarce. Adopting the perspective of Positive Psychology 2.0 (PP2.0), this study aims to test a chain mediation model examining associations among social support, meaning in life, psychological resilience, and lying flat. METHODS: The study targeted a university student population and adopted a cross-sectional online survey design, yielding 2,323 valid responses from 30 provinces across China. Data collection instruments included the Lying Flat Mentality Questionnaire, the Social Support Scale, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and the Psychological Resilience Scale. SPSS 27.0 was used for reliability and validity analyses, correlation analysis, and multicollinearity diagnostics. Subsequently, AMOS 28.0 was used to construct a structural equation model (SEM). Common method bias was examined, and the chain mediation role was tested while controlling for four demographic variables (gender, grade, university type, and household registration type). RESULTS: (1) Lying flat was significantly and negatively correlated with social support, meaning in life, and psychological resilience (r ranged from - 0.62 to - 0.43); (2) meaning in life mediated the association between social support and lying flat; (3) psychological resilience also mediated the association between social support and lying flat; and (4) meaning in life and psychological resilience jointly formed a chain-mediated role between social support and lying flat, with the mediating effect accounting for 70.2% of the total effect, and the model explaining 51.9% of the variance in lying flat. DISCUSSION: These findings underscore the roles of social support, meaning in life, and psychological resilience in understanding the lying flat phenomenon among university students, highlighting the complex interplay among these factors. Informed by these observed relationships and existing theoretical perspectives, an Integrative analytical Framework of "Resource-Psychological Capital-Coping" (RPCCF) is proposed as a heuristic framework to offer a possible interpretive perspective for understanding lying flat and help inform preliminary future discussions on educational or intervention-relevant considerations among Chinese university students.