关键词: 强迫思考, 压力知觉, 不反应, 抑郁, 高中生

Abstract: Adolescence is an important formative developmental stage that lays the groundwork for well-being and mental health in adulthood. However, China has seen a worrying increase in the prevalence of mental health issues among adolescents, particularly high school students. The government has demonstrated the urgent needs for a collective evidence-based effort to improve adolescents’ mental health. Thus, it is important to pay more attention to explore the factors and mechanisms that affect depression of high school students. Rumination is a responding style to distress that involves repetitively focusing on symptoms and on causes and consequences of symptoms, which may predict and maintain depression. While rumination can be divided into brooding and pondering, it is found that brooding taps the negative aspects of self-reflection including a focus on abstract issues and obstacles to overcoming problems. When faced with the high-pressure event like Gaokao, students who have high tendency of brooding are more likely to appraise their problems as overwhelming and blame themselves, leading to greater stress perception and reactivity, which may consequently contribute to increase the risk of depression. Moreover, according to the third wave of cognitive therapy, nonreactivity, the ability to notice or observe internal and external experience without “getting stuck” or fixated, is necessary for reducing perceived stress, by modifying one’s relation to monitored sensation, emotion, and thoughts. Although the effect of nonreactivity on moderating the relationship between monitoring external perceptions and depression, little research has investigated how nonreactivity moderated the relationship between one’ own thinking style and depression. Therefore, the present study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine how nonreactivity would moderate the indirect effect of brooding on symptoms of depression via perceived stress. A sample of 501 high school students (mean age =16 years, SD =0.71) participated in this study. Brooding was measured by brooding subscale of the Ruminative Responses Scale. Perceived stress was assessed with the Perceived Stress Scale. Nonreactivity subscale of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire was used to assess nonreactivity. Depression was assessed with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. All the measures showed good reliability and validity in the present study. Data were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and the SPSS macro PROCESS. The results indicated that: (1) After controlling for gender, perceived stress totally mediated the relationship between brooding and depression. (2) Nonreactivity significantly moderated the indirect effect of brooding on symptoms of depression through perceived stress. In particular, brooding was much more positively related to perceived stress among individuals with low nonreactivity levels than high nonreactivity levels. These findings of the study highlight the mediating role of perceived stress and the moderating role of nonreactivity in the effect of brooding on high school students’ depression. It offers several important implications for mental health education in high schools. First, mental education is necessary to be delivered in early adolescents, which helps them to adopt adaptive responding styles under the great pressure rather than maladaptive styles. Second, the attitude of acceptance should be facilitated in adolescents via mindfulness-based training, which can play a critical role in stress management.

Key words: brooding, perceived stress, nonreactivity, depression, high school students