The Influence Of Social Support On Depression: Advance Response And Mediating Role Of Positive Emotions

With the rise of the positive psychology, the researchers have been gradually changing their main emphasis of their studies into the individual positive quality, in which proactive coping and the concerning of the positive emotions in academics has formed. Proactive coping is a kind of action which was taken before the pressure has come. It means a series of efforts of an individual who wants to challenge him or self-development. Studies in the past have found that social support can not only be able to improve the individual’s positive emotion but also can improve the positive emotion through the proactive coping. The frequent experiences of positive emotion may reduce the possibility of depression, and that is the exact goal the psychologists want to achieve. Discussing the interaction mechanism of the social support acting upon depression, this essay lays more stress on investigating the mediating effect of proactive coping as well as positive emotion in the mode.Longitudinal study design methods has been adopted in this research, which contains Perceived Social Support Scale(PSSS), Social Support Rating Scale(SSRS), Proactive Coping Subscale(PCS), Positive and Negative Affect Scale(PANAS) and Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale(CES-D). We do this research to the students of two universities in Beijing. We use T test, correlation analysis and structural equation model to study the influence of the social support acting upon the depression of the students. We also discuss the function of the proactive coping and positive emotions in the whole procedure. The study shows:The proactive coping of the college students have a significant difference in the demographic variable degree of parents who have received education (father p<0.01, mother p<0.001).The perceived social support have a significant difference in the gender (p<0.01), while the received social support (except the dimension of the utilization of support) has no gender difference (p>0.05). The proactive coping, social support and positive emotions have remarkable relations with depression of the college students. Partially, proactive coping mediates between the social support and positive emotion and the later is an mediator between both the social support and depression as well as the proactive coping and depression. In order to prevent the depression from occurring, we can increase the social support for an individual, teach one proactive coping strategy and pay more attention to the experience of the individual’s positive emotion in the future clinic intervention.