Abstract Recent studies suggest that the surface personality traits mediate the basic personality traits and the performances. The surface personality traits are referred to as surface behaviors, described as individual differences in tendencies to behave within specific situational contexts. Compared with surface traits, the basic personality traits are enduring dispositions which are indicative of prevailing behaviors in a range of situations. As psychologists have long been interested in the role of Interpersonal Competence in adolescents’ mental health and interpersonal interaction, the present study explore the proposed relationships by adopting a hierarchical approach to Interpersonal Competence as a basic personality trait or independent variable, Social Adaptiveness as a surface personality trait or mediator, and Social Inferiority and Mental Health as dependent variables respectively. What’s more, the relation between Social Inferiority and Mental Health is also be examined. In addition to the three subscales of the YG, namely Lack of Objectivity, Lack of Cooperativeness, Aggressiveness, the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire(ICQ), the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Adolescents’ Social Inferiority Scale were presented to the 841 middle school student subjects, who were from grade 7 through 12 and selected by stratified sampling. The Anderson & Gerbing(1988)’s Two-step Approach to Structural Equation Modeling, the bias-corrected percentile Bootstrap method and the Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling were applied to analysis the data. Firstly，in accordance with expectations, the results showed that 1) Interpersonal Competence was a significant predictor of Social Adaptiveness (β=-.193，t=-4.007**)， Social Inferiority(β=-.167，t=-4.333**), and Mental Health(β=-.354，t=-8.980**); 2) Social Adaptiveness was a significant predictor of Social Inferiority (β=.298，t=6.389**) and Mental Health(β=.544，t=10.277**). So，what could be concluded was that Social Adaptiveness could mediate the relationship between Interpersonal Competence and Adolescents’ Social Inferiority，and the relationship between Interpersonal Competence and Mental Health, respectively. It was surprising that there was no significant relation between Adolescents’ Social Inferiority and their Mental Health (β=.054，t=1.663). Secondly，the bias-corrected percentile Bootstrap method was carried out to reveal the mediation of Social Adaptiveness on the relationships between Interpersonal Competence and Adolescents’ Social Inferiority. The results of the means of 1000 resamples showed that there was partial mediation as the 95% confidence interval was[-.097，-.024]，and the mediator effect was .344 with the 95% confidence interval being [.134, .554]. In the same way, the bias-corrected percentile Bootstrap method was carried out to reveal the mediation of Social Adaptiveness on the relationships between Interpersonal Competence and Mental Health. The results of the means of 1000 resamples showed that there was partial mediation as the 95% confidence interval was[-.177, -.055]，and the mediator effect was .297 with the 95% confidence interval being [.048, .546]. Lastly, the Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling showed there was multi-group invariance among 2 samples (the ECVI value of the unconstrained model was .257, the ECVI value of the measurement weights model was .252, the ECVI value of the structural covariances model was .256, and the ECVI value of the measurement residuals model was .318). These findings indicated that for secondary school students, Interpersonal Competence had effect both on Social Inferiority and on Mental Health, and the effect was partially mediated by Social Adaptiveness. But their Social Inferiority wound not necessarily result in their Mental Health problem because there was no significant relation between these two variables. Future studies, using different health behaviors and experimental designs, could firmly find the role of Interpersonal Competence and Social Adaptiveness in the social behaviors and they thus should become the routine targets for the interventions.