Students Maladaptive Schema And Its Relationship With Depression, Self-esteem

Nowadays, Young's schema theory becomes the available supply of traditional cognitive behaviour therapy. It's broad used in treating chronic mental disease, especially personality disorder. Young developed Young Schema Questionnaire -Long Form and Young Schema Questionnaire -Short Form, for measuring early maladaptive schema. The reliability and validity has been proved in Western sample.This study revised Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form, using item analysis, factor analysis and construct equation, and found that Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form has 15 factors, which is the same in theory. The results indicate that Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form has high alpha coefficients and good construct validity, and the 15 factors correlate with each other. This study explores the relationship of schemas, self-esteem and depression by surveying a sample of 362 Chinese university students through questionnaires.The results indicate that schema can predict self-esteem and depression, and the schemas which predict self-esteem are failure to achieve, defectiveness/shame, entitlement, emotional inhibition, functional dependence/incompetence and unrelenting standards, and the schemas which predict depression are social isolation/alienation, subjugation, mistrust/abuse and functional dependence/incompetence. The results provide the empirical support for using schema therapy treat depression and enhance self-esteem.