Purpose in life assessment with artificial intelligence: a contextual approach to mental health in university students
Arrioja-Carrera, Guillermo Alfredo; Roldán-Reyes, Eduardo; Velázquez-Morales, Pedro Humberto; Méndez-García, Víctor
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Language
- en
Abstract
The Purpose in Life Questionnaire (PIL) assesses life purpose and its connection to depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. This exploratory, longitudinal study investigates the sense of life purpose among 114 university students from three institutions in Mexico, using the PIL and 18 additional context-based questions. These extra items were grouped into a Contextual Opportunity Index (COI) consisting of four dimensions: demographics, academic-cultural background, access to public-private services, and lifestyle. Results show that 57% of participants reported a defined life purpose, 26.3% experienced existential uncertainty, and 16.7% showed signs of an existential void. The lifestyle dimension showed the strongest correlation with life purpose—particularly "nuclear family situation" (r = 0.431, p < 0.000001) and ``travel and leisure" (r = 0.263, p = 0.005). Predictive modeling using Naive Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers revealed that students' attitudes toward death acceptance, heavily influenced final PIL scores. Additionally, the dimensions Access to private services and Demography variables were linked to a higher PIL score. These findings suggest that both internal and contextual factors contribute to students’ psychological well-being and life meaning.
Full text
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computing Applications (2025) - Special Issue - 3(2): 12 Conference abstract Purpose in life assessment with artificial intelligence: a contextual approach to mental health in university students Guillermo Alfredo Arrioja-Carrera 1,*, Eduardo Rold´an-Reyes 1, Pedro Humberto Vel´azquezMorales 2, and V´ıctor M´endez-Garc´ıa 1 1Tecnol´ogico Nacional de M´exico - Tecnol´ogico de Orizaba 2Universidad Veracruzana ABSTRACT The Purpose in Life Questionnaire (PIL) assesses life purpose and its connection to depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. This exploratory, longitudinal study investigates the sense of life purpose among 114 university students from three institutions in Mexico, using the PIL and 18 additional context-based questions. These extra items were grouped into a Contextual Opportunity Index (COI) consisting of four dimensions: demographics, academic-cultural background, access to public-private services, and lifestyle. Results show that 57% of participants reported a defined life purpose, 26.3% experienced existential uncertainty, and 16.7% showed signs of an existential void. The lifestyle dimension showed the strongest correlation with life purpose—particularly “nuclear family situation” (r= 0.431, p<0.000001) and “travel and leisure” (r= 0.263, p= 0.005). Predictive modeling using Naive Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers revealed that students’ attitudes toward death acceptance, heavily influenced final PIL scores. Additionally, the dimensions Access to private services and Demography variables were linked to a higher PIL score. These findings suggest that both internal and contextual factors contribute to students’ psychological well-being and life meaning. Keywords: purpose in life, predictive modeling, mental health This work corresponds to a paper presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Mental Health (ICAIMH) 2025. The complete version is expected to be published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computing Applications (JAICA) and will be available at: https://www.maikron.org/jaica/. E-mail address: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17203619 ©2025 The Author(s). Published by Maikron. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. This article is part of the Special Issue on ICAIMH 2025. ISSN: 3061-8843
