The Influence Of Support Seeking On Depressive Symptoms In Adolescents:the Moderating Role Of Family Communication

In recent years,studies on depression have shown that the choice of emotion regulation strategies is closely related to depressive symptoms: for example,rumination,suppression,catastrophing,reappraisal and other regulation strategies will have different effects on the relief of negative emotions,and then affect the development of depressive symptoms.However,the conclusions of previous studies were mostly based on adults with depression.As a high-risk period for the first episode of depression,adolescent depression may have different emotion regulation and emotion response patterns from adults with depression due to this particularity of physiological and social function development stages.Since social communication skills are one of the important abilities in adolescent development and are significantly related to depressive symptoms,this paper will focus on the relationship between support seeking as an emotional regulation strategy and depressive symptoms.In addition,due to the lack of life experience,the ability that adolescent needs to face the emotional events independently is not yet mature,seeking support and help from others is an important way to relieve they depression,and family members are important objects for them to seeking support,therefore,the family communication patterns may largely affect the way that adolescents use to seek support,and relieve symptoms of depression.According to the "person context interaction theory",people’s psychological development is affected by the interaction terms of individual and environmental factors.Therefore,this paper believes that family communication is the moderator variable between adolescents’ support seeking and depressive symptoms.In order to further explore the relationship between support seeking strategy and depressive symptoms in adolescents,and to explore the moderating role of family communication in this relationship,this study used meta-analysis and questionnaire to conduct the study.In Study 1,13 emotion regulation strategies were summarized,and systematic searches were conducted for relevant articles published between 1985 and May 2019,a meta-analysis were ran based on the data from 496 articles,and further focused on the relationship between the use of emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms in adolescent population.The results showed that the depressive symptoms of adolescents were negatively correlated with the use of adaptive strategies,and positively correlated with the use of maladaptive strategies.There was a moderate negative correlation between support seeking strategy and depressive symptoms(r=-0.12,k=11,p<0.01),indicating that support seeking strategy is one of the most important adaptive emotion regulation strategies for adolescents.In Study 2,the revised version of the Family Communication Pattern Scale(Parent and Child Version)was first revised in Chinese.The internal consistency reliability of internal dimension and the total scale of the scale were both above 0.8,and both are well-fitted the two-factor model,indicating that the scale had good reliability and validity.Then,we examined the moderating effect of family communication on the relationship between support seeking and depressive symptoms among 2,211 primary and middle school students and their parents from four schools in Shanghai.The results showed that adolescents’ perception of conversation-orientation of family communication moderated the relationship between support seeking strategy and depressive symptoms,and parents’ perception of family communication(conversationorientation and conformity-orientation)had no significant moderating effect on the relationship between adolescents’ support seeking strategy and depression symptoms.There are significant differences between parents’ perception of family communication and adolescents’ perception of family communication.Parents’ perception of conversation-orientation is significantly higher than adolescents’ perception,and the degree to which adolescents scored higher than their parents on conversationorientation predicted fewer depressive symptoms in adolescents.Parents’ perception of conformity-orientation is significantly lower than adolescents’ perception,and the degree to which adolescents scored higher than their parents on conformity-orientation predicted more depressive symptoms in adolescents.This study found that family communication and support seeking strategies are important protection factors of adolescent depression symptoms,support seeking and adolescent depression reduce have significant relations,and adolescents’ perception about how unconstrained the family can talk to each other on various topics in their family can significantly reduce adolescences’ burden of regulate negative emotions,so as to remit adolescences’ depressive symptoms.