In recent years, due to the rapid development of my country's social economy, extremely fierce competition system, and high academic pressure, many college students with relatively weak psychological endurance are very likely to develop depression. Depression among college students has attracted more and more researchers' attention.
Luo Hong and others conducted a survey on 275 college students and found that 55.3% of the students had symptoms of depression; Li Chengfeng and others analyzed the research and analysis of 504 freshmen, which showed that 61.9% of college students had a tendency to depression. It can be seen that college students' depression has become the most common problem in our country and even the world today.
Depressed emotions will seriously affect college students' academic performance, enthusiasm for life and way of dealing with people. The long-term depressed mood will lead to college students being in a negative emotional state for a long time, causing damage to college students' physical and mental health, reducing their enthusiasm for learning, and obstacles to interpersonal communication, which has adverse effects on the mental health development of college students.
Therefore, this study will use college students as subjects to investigate and study their family education methods, emotional regulation strategies and depression, and explore the relationship between depression emotions, emotional regulation strategies and family education methods. It is expected that it can provide some theoretical basis for parents to reflect on their parenting methods, so as to promote students' psychological development better and healthier.
Family education method: an important potential factor in the formation of depression
Family education method refers to the relatively stable behaviors shown by parents in the process of raising children, and is a summary of the characteristics of parents' various parenting behaviors.
Family parenting method is also called parenting method, which is related to individual emotions and various aspects of development. For example, parents who hold authoritative parenting methods show more enthusiasm, love and patience to their children.
Individuals under this type of parenting method are confident and more capable of controlling their emotions and behaviors when facing challenges; children who grow up under the authoritarian parenting method are prone to evasion, anxiety, inferiority and depression, and cannot control their emotions well when facing problems, and their psychological adjustment ability is also weak.
Many researchers have conducted relevant research on the relationship between family education and depression. They found that family education is one of the important potential factors for depression. Inappropriate family education will increase the risk of children suffering from depression during their growth.
Hanne et al. investigated the family education methods of 504 subjects and found that depressed patients were usually related to negative family education methods; Emily et al. discussed the relationship between the level of depression symptoms in adolescents and the parental education methods.
results show that the parents of adolescents with low levels of depression symptoms are more accepting and understanding of them, while those of the adolescents whose parents exert strict control have relatively high levels of depression.
Jennifer et al. conducted a comparative study of 44 teenagers with depression symptoms and 44 normal teenagers, which concluded that the family education methods of normal teenagers are more appropriate and reasonable than those of depressed teenagers.
Considering the differences in culture between China and the West, many researchers in my country have also paid more and more attention to the impact of family education methods on children's depression symptoms in recent years. Li Li and others measured the depression symptoms and parenting methods of teenagers aged 14 to 22 years old.
results found that the family education methods of adolescents with depression symptoms are very similar. Most of their parents use bad parenting methods such as excessive interference, refusal to deny, and severe punishment.
In the study of Fu Wei and others, they selected 73 patients with depression as the case group, and selected the corresponding 81 normal people as the control group to measure their family education and depression levels. The results show that the family education methods of depressed patients planted the seeds of depression in the early stages of their children's growth.
Tao Qinglan and others used the Parental Education Method Scale and the Adolescent Life Event Scale to investigate and study 30 healthy college students and 30 depressed college students. The results showed that part of the causes of depressed college students are caused by their poor family education methods.
In addition, some researchers have also discussed the internal mechanisms of family education affecting depression. By measuring the depression symptoms, alienation and parenting methods of 1,900 college students, Rao Yanting and others found that the parenting methods and family environment have a certain impact on the sense of alienation of children, and will in turn affect college students' depression to varying degrees.
In this study, we used college students as the research object to explore the relationship between family education methods and depressed emotions and the mediation role of emotion regulation strategies (including cognitive re-evaluation and expression inhibition) between family education methods and depressed emotions in college students.
Study 1 We adopted the Chinese version of the parenting method questionnaire, Beck Depression Scale and Adolescent Life Event Scale, in order to explore the relationship between family education methods and depression among college students after controlling for demographic variables and life event variables.
Research 2 We used the Chinese version of the parenting method questionnaire, the emotional regulation measurement questionnaire and the Beck depression scale to explore the relationship between the parenting method, the emotional regulation strategy and the depression of college students.
In the study, we found that parenting methods have a significant predictive effect on depression. There is a significant negative correlation between the parenting methods of fathers and mothers who have warm emotions and understanding and the depression of college students. There is a significant positive correlation between the parenting methods of fathers and mothers who have severe punishment, refusal to deny, excessive interference and excessive protection and the depression of college students.
This shows that a good, reasonable and appropriate family education method will make college students experience less depressed emotions, and an inappropriate and unreasonable family education method will make college students experience more depressed emotions. We also found the same conclusion in Study 2. This is similar to previous researchers' findings.
This shows that parents' emotional warmth and understanding can create a safe, positive and healthy growth environment for their children, which can easily make their children feel caring and supportive, and help individuals to timely evacuate bad emotions, develop positive emotions, and form self-identity.
On the contrary, parents' refusal to deny, severe punishment, excessive interference and other bad parenting methods will make their children lack self-confidence and develop inferiority complex, which will make them suppress their emotions and unable to evacuate negative emotions in time, which will easily lead to depression.
Therefore, parents should give their children more care, love, understanding and support, and use strict and moderate scientific education to promote their healthy growth.
Some researchers have found that family education methods will affect individuals' emotions regulation ability and the choice of emotional regulation strategies to some extent. The choice of individual emotions regulation strategies is also a key factor affecting their depressed emotions, which shows that there is a certain connection between family education methods, emotional regulation and depressed emotions.
However, few researchers at home and abroad have discussed the internal mechanisms of family education that affect depression. Therefore, we further explored the relationship between family education styles, emotional regulation strategies, and depression in our study.
Emotional regulation strategy will be affected by the parenting style. There is a significant positive correlation between father and mother's emotional warmth and understanding parenting methods and cognitive reassessment strategies.
There is a significant negative correlation between the parenting methods of severe punishment and refusal to deny and the cognitive reassessment strategy, and there is a significant positive correlation between the parenting methods of severe punishment and refusal to deny and the expression inhibition strategy.
study also found that there was a significant negative correlation between cognitive reassessment strategies and depression among college students. This shows that in daily life, when people develop negative emotions in the face of negative events, if they can understand the events from a different perspective with a more positive attitude, and make a new personal significance of emotional events and rationalize evaluation.
will reduce or even eliminate your negative emotions, thereby avoiding the occurrence of depression or experiencing less depression.
In addition, we also have an important discovery in our research, that is, the cognitive reassessment strategy in emotion regulation strategies has a partial mediating role between some parenting methods and college students' depression.
Previous studies have confirmed that family education methods are one of the important reasons for affecting individual emotional regulation, and the use of emotional regulation strategies is an effective predictor of depressed emotions. Therefore, the impact of family education methods on depressed emotions can be changed by affecting the use of individual emotional regulation strategies.
This shows that parents' upbringing methods will affect their children's emotional regulation strategies when facing bad emotions, and thus affect their children's depressive emotional experience.
Therefore, in the future, parents should use emotional warmth and understanding parenting methods to cultivate their children's habit of using positive emotional regulation strategies, improve their children's ability to regulate emotions, and encourage their children to form a positive attitude to face negative events to reduce the risk of depression
There are still certain limitations in this study, which need to be further explored and improved in future research. First of all, in addition to cognitive re-evaluation and expression inhibition, emotional regulation strategies also include other cognitive emotion regulation strategies, such as: contemplation, avoidance, acceptance, problem solving, and catastrophic strategies.
Therefore, future research on emotional regulation and depression symptoms can further optimize the specific and joint effects of these different strategies.
Second, this study conducted separate research and discussion of the father's parenting style and the mother's parenting style in family education, which helps us understand the impact of a specific parenting style of father or mother on children, but individuals in non-single-parent families are often affected by the dual parenting style of father and mother.
Third, therefore, future research can explore the impact of parents' comprehensive parenting methods on children's emotional regulation and depression symptoms.
