Abstract
Social rejection is regarded as a common phenomenon that has a great influence on the physical and mental health of people. Some studies shown that, as a group with a high incidence of social rejection, college students tended to fall into a strong sense of loneliness, depression, anxious, intense psychological pain and other negative emotions. In addition, according to the Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory, people usually require positive responses from significant others, such as support, care, and acceptance. On the contrary, if an individual perceives the indifference, neglect or rejection of significant others, it may lead to negative emotions and psychological problems. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the negative effects of social rejection on college students. Researchers also suggested that social rejection may cause one’s depression. but the mechanism between them needs to be further studied. According to the Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory's Personality Subtheory, social rejection could weaken the ability of dealing with emotional stress and emotional regulation. So, negative worldview, negative self-esteem, negative self-adequacy are important elements in the social-cognition or mental representations of rejected persons. The negative mental representations may further increase their risk of depression. Therefore, emotional awareness is an important mediating variable. Furthermore, considering the parent-adolescent communication through WeChat may promote interpersonal relationship, we believe that it is necessary to explore the impact of social rejection. Meanwhile, we strive to provide theoretical support for the prevention and intervention of college students’ social rejection and to reduce the negative effects from such aspect.
For above reasons, the study aimed to investigate the association between social rejection and depression, as well as the mediating effect of emotional awareness and the moderating effect of parent-adolescent communication through WeChat. The questionnaire consists of four parts, including the Social Rejection Subscale Questionnaire for the Youth Self Report protocol, the Emotional Awareness Questionnaire, the Parent-adolescent communication Scale, and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). 431 college students were selected as samples, of which 154 were male and 277 were female, with an average age of 19.88(SD =1.52). Data was collected and analyzed with SPSS 19.0, and the bias-corrected percentile Bootstrap method was used to examine the mediating effect of emotional awareness and the moderating effect of parent-adolescent communication through WeChat. The results indicated that: (1) After controlling for gender and age, social rejection was positively correlated with depression, while negatively correlated with emotional awareness and parent-adolescent communication through WeChat; whereas both emotional awareness and parent-adolescent communication through WeChat were negatively correlated with depression. (2) Social rejection is not only directly related to the depression, also indirectly affected the depression through the mediating effect of emotional awareness. (3) The direct effect of social rejection on depression was moderated by parent-adolescent communication through WeChat, and the effect was more obvious among college students who enjoy high-frequency parent-adolescent communication through WeChat. In summary, a moderated mediation model of emotional awareness and parent-adolescent communication through WeChat was constructed to reveal the underlying mechanism between social rejection and depression in study, which can contribute to a better understanding of the way and the time that social rejection increases the risk of depression. Furthermore, it suggested that early intervention concerning diminishing the negative effects of social rejection may start with increasing the individual’s emotional awareness and parent-adolescent communication through WeChat.
Key words
College student /
Social rejection /
Emotional awareness /
Wechat parent-adolescent communication /
Depression
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The Relationship between Social Rejection and College Student Depression: Moderating Role of Wechat Parent-Adolescent Communication and Mediating Role of Emotional Awareness[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(5): 1159-1165
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