The relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and academic burnout among university students: the mediating role of future time perspective and the moderating role of psychological flexibility.

INTRODUCTION: Academic burnout is an important manifestation of academic maladjustment among university students and is closely related to their academic development and mental health. The association between intolerance of uncertainty and academic burnout may partly reflect differences in students' future-oriented cognition. This study examined the mediating role of future time perspective in the association between intolerance of uncertainty and academic burnout and tested the moderating role of psychological flexibility in the association between future time perspective and academic burnout. METHODS: A convenience sample of 855 Chinese university students from five provinces participated in a cross-sectional questionnaire survey. Participants completed measures of intolerance of uncertainty, future time perspective, psychological flexibility, and academic burnout. Pearson correlations were calculated, and PROCESS Model 14 was estimated using 5,000 bootstrap resamples and HC3 robust standard errors. Analyses adjusted for sex, age, year of study, and academic discipline. RESULTS: Higher intolerance of uncertainty was associated with higher academic burnout and lower future time perspective. Lower future time perspective was also associated with higher academic burnout. Future time perspective partially mediated the association between intolerance of uncertainty and academic burnout, and the direct effect of intolerance of uncertainty on academic burnout remained significant. Psychological flexibility moderated the future time perspective-academic burnout association, such that the negative association and the corresponding conditional indirect effect were stronger at higher levels of psychological flexibility. However, the interaction had a negligible incremental effect (ΔR2 = 0.007; Cohen's f2 = 0.013). DISCUSSION: This study found that intolerance of uncertainty was positively associated with academic burnout among university students and that future time perspective partially mediated this association. Psychological flexibility moderated the association between future time perspective and academic burnout, such that the negative association was stronger at higher levels of psychological flexibility. Because this study used a cross-sectional self-report design, the temporal ordering or causal relationships among the variables cannot be determined from these data. Future longitudinal research on academic burnout among university students is needed to verify these associations.