The Relationship Between Gratitude And Depression

In this study,trait gratitude is used as a measure of gratitude level of College students.The purpose of this study is to understand the current situation and characteristics of gratitude,depression and coping style of college students by measuring three variables:trait gratitude,depression and coping style,focusing on gratitude to the influence of depression and coping styles(positive and negative coping styles)parallel intermediary effect.A total of 366 questionnaires were distributed among freshmen and seniors from a university in Nanjing,Jiangsu province,and 362 valid questionnaires were obtained after the questionnaires with a missing rate of more than 5%were deleted.The gratitude trait scale,depression self-rating scale(SDS)and simple coping style questionnaire(SCSQ)were used as the measuring tools.SPSS21.0 was used for correlation analysis,t-test and variance analysis,and Mplus 7.0 was used for parallel mediating effect test.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)College students without depression accounted for 70.7%,mild depression 21.3%,moderate depression 5.8%,and severe depression 2.2%.Overall,the detection rate of depression in college students was 29.3%.(2)There is no difference in gender,professional nature,parents’ education level,and whether they are only children in college students’ depression,but there is a significant difference in the location of their families.(3)The gratitude level of college students varies significantly with gender and specialty,but there are no significant differences in the four demographic variables of family location,parents’ education level and whether they are the only child.Among them,the gratitude level of female students is significantly higher than that of male students,and the gratitude level of liberal arts students is significantly higher than that of science and engineering students.(4)The average scores of positive coping and negative coping of college students have no significant difference in specialty nature,family location,parents’ education level and whether they are the only child,except for gender.Among them,the negative coping level of female college students is significantly higher than that of male college students.(5)Depression has a significant negative correlation with gratitude and positive coping,and a significant positive correlation with negative coping.(6)The direct effect between gratitude and depression was significant,with a direct effect of 77.6%.The mediating effect of positive coping on the effect of gratitude on depression was not significant,with an effect of 15.9%.The mediating effect of negative coping on the effect of gratitude on depression was not significant,and the effect size was 6.3%.The total mediating effect of the model was significant,and the amount of concurrent mediating effect of positive coping and negative coping was 22.4%.The results show that gratitude level of college students can directly and negatively affect their depression level.In addition,gratitude can affect depression by increasing positive coping and decreasing negative coping.Positive coping and negative coping are the concurrent mediating variables of gratitude and depression.