Abstract
This study aims to explore the relationship between social support, meaning in life and depression, and further explore the mediating role of meaning in life between social support and depression. This survey of 287 university students were investigated with the short version of Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D-13), the Social Support Rating Scale (SSRS), and the Chinese Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ). The results showed that: (1)The junior is the most serious period of depressive symptoms(11.33±7.019), and also an important turning point; (2) Non-only-child (10.23±6.713) were significantly higher than the only-child (9.02±6.230) about depressive symptoms (p=0.0368); (3)The depression were significantly negatively correlated with social support (r=-0.35, p<0.01) and the meaning in life(r=0.39, p<0.01), but there was a significant negative correlation between the meaning in life and social support (r=0.28, p<0.01); (4) The meaning in life plays a partial mediating role between social supports and depressive symptoms in university students. This research provides theoretical evidence for the prevention and intervention of university students’ depression from two aspects of social support and meaning in life.
Highlights
Depression is a mood disorder which is manifested as significant and enduring depression, drops of interest, anhedonia and other clinical manifestations, characterized by high morbidity, high recurrence rate, high suicide rate and high disability rate [1]
Under the background of education system reform and grim employment situation, university students are facing the increasingly pressure in study and employment, the depressive symptoms are prone to show up [3].For example, Wang et al conducted a meta-analysis on the survey results of the prevalence of depression among Chinese university students from
This study concluded that social support can directly and negatively predict university students' depression, and it can indirectly predict university students' depression through the meaning in life
Summary
Depression is a mood disorder which is manifested as significant and enduring depression, drops of interest, anhedonia and other clinical manifestations, characterized by high morbidity, high recurrence rate, high suicide rate and high disability rate [1]. According to the Interpersonal Model, individuals with low social support level are prone to get depression when they are facing with stressful life events [5]. The internal mechanisms of social support in relation to depression in adolescents include main effect and stress buffering effect. The former emphasizes that good social support is beneficial to individuals no matter whether they are in a state of stress or not; The latter emphasizes that social support can alleviate the negative impact of individual stressful events and reduce the incidence of depression [6]. There is a stable moderate negative correlation between social support and depression among Chinese university students [8,9], but they are not directly related with each other. Further understanding about how social support affects the mediating variables of depression is helpful for universities to formulate measures for prevention and intervention of depression
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