| As social animals, humans have a strong need for belonging and social connection. Individuals' physical and mental health will be affected negatively, if these basic needs are not satisfied. Social exclusion, which is a common experience on daily bases, thwarts people's pervasive need for belonging and cuts off people's access to the benefits associated with social connection, and further brings negative effect on humans' psychological social adaptation. Experimental methods were widely used in previous studies, and there no instrument to examine the social exclusion. Thus, we aimed to analyse the reliability and validity indicators of the Ostracism Experience Scale for Adolescents among Chinese adolescents.With the development of society and economy, especially the gradually speeding up of life and work, mental health has become a prominent social problem. Among these problems, depression is a common mood disorder and mental health problem, with high incidence in modern society, which will cause great harms to individuals, families, and society. In addition, with the development of positive psychology, positive personality traits, such as optimism, get researchers' increasing attentions, which is an important protective factor for individuals' psychological social adaptation. Thus, we further aimed to investigate the effect of social exclusion on adolescents' depression, as well as the moderating effect of optimism between them.Around this goal, we conducted two studies as follows:In study 1, we first translated the questionnaire items according to standardized procedures-preliminary translation, back-translation, discussion, modification. Then, 528 middle school students (average ages were 14.98 years, ranging from 12 to 18 years) were selected to complete this questionnaire, and this data was used to conducte the exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the internal consistency coefficients were also caulated. The exploratory factor analysis suggested a two-factor solution, which explained 67.39% of variance; the confirmatory factor analysis suggested a good fit of the data to the two-factor model(x2/df= 4.27, RMSEA=0.071, GFI=0.923, CFI=0.945, AGFI=0.902, NFI=0.936). And the Cronbach's a coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.93, and Cronbach's a coefficients were 0.86 and 0.89 for the two factors.In study 2,1259 middle school students (average ages were 14.79 years, ranging from 12 to 18 vears) were selected to complete the Beck Depression Inventory-?. the Social Exclusion Scale for Adolescents, and Adolescent Optimism Scale. The results showed that:? Boys scored significantly higher than girls on social exclusion, and the social exclusion showed a trend of rise first then fall with the increase of grade; boys also scored significantly higher than girls on optimism, and optimism was on the decline with the increase of grade; the detection rate of depression among adolescents was 16.8% in this study, girls scored significantly higher than boys on depression, and depression also showed a trend of rise first then fall with the.increase of grade. ? Partial correlation analysis showed that, social exclusion was positively correlated with depression, while negatively correlated with optimism, and optimism was also negatively correlated with depression. ? Hierarchical multiple regression further showed that, social exclusion showed a significant positive association with depression, and optimism showed a negative positive association with depression. The cocial exclusion × optimism interaction was also significant, which revealed the moderating effect of optimism in the relationship between social exclusion and depression. Further simple slopes test revealed that, for the group with low level of optimism, there is a significant positive relationship between socialexclusion and depression, but this relationship was not significant for group with high level of optimism, namely, optimism could release the negative effect of social exclusion on depression. |
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