Abstract:

Abstract: Adolescence is characteristic of more vulnerability to depressive symptoms as adolescents develop rapidly in various aspects such as physical fitness, cognitive capacity and social roles. On the path to seek autonomy, independence and social identity, adolescents inevitably face various kinds of stressors which induce depressive symptoms when they could not cope with them adequately. Among these stressors, home stressors exist so frequently in adolescents' life that might aggravate adolescents' depressive symptoms. Although extant research has established the relationship between stressors and adolescents' depression, the mediating linkages in between remains to be explored. As a coping strategy, rumination refers to individuals' frequent recall of negative events that has happened in the past. The current study hypothesized that three home stressors such as family conflict, parental expectation and family rules are not only directly predict adolescents' depressive symptoms, they also indirectly affect depression through the mediating role of rumination. Aiming at testing these hypotheses, 570 students were chosen conveniently as our subjects from one junior high school and one senior high school in Jining, Shandong province, and data was gathered by administering such instruments as Depressive Experience Questionnaire, Ruminative Responses Scale, and Family Stress Questionnaire. By conducting path analyses, results indicated that both family conflict and parental expectation positively and significantly prophesy adolescents' depressive symptoms while family rules had no significant effect on depression. Similarly, the former two types of family stressors had positive and significant effect on adolescents' rumination while the third type had no obvious effect on depression. And rumination had positive and significant effect on depression. Taken together, rumination mediated the relationship between family stress and adolescents' depressive symptoms. Based on the above results, the following conclusions could be reached: home stressors are important predictors of adolescents' depressive symptoms but with different kinds of home stressors having different effects on depression. Among the three examined home stressors, family conflict has the largest impact on adolescents' depressive symptoms, with parental expectation ranking the second and family rule no effect on depression. Similarly, family conflict tends to induce rumination in adolescents when they face home stressors, as does parental expectation. what's more important is that rumination acts as a mediating role between home stressors and depressive symptoms. These results and conclusions mean a lot in that they provide theoretical guidance for coping with adolescents' depressive symptoms induced by home stressors. Specifically, it's reasonable for parents to avoid conflicts with their spouses and children, and once conflicts have occurred, they should actively resolve them. And parents should have adequate expectations in their children so as to reduce children's rumination and then depressive symptoms.