The Impact Of Maternal Depression On Adolescent Depression: A Moderated Mediation Model

Depression is a common mental disorder with symptoms such as sadness, loss of interest or pleasure, disturbed sleep or appetite, and poor concentration. On average about oneout oftwenty people report an episode of depression over the world. The prevalence of depression rises in adolescence, and a great percent of youth(20–50%) endorse significant levels of depressive symptoms. Maternal depression has a nature of intergenerational transmission. Children of depressed mothers were two to three times more likely to develop mood disorders. Many studies indicated that maternal depression was a high risk factor for the development of adolescent health.Those mothers who are depressed have negative cognitive style, affectivity, and behavior, and in turn create pressure living environments which lead to psychological and behavior problemsof their children.Although a lot of researches have tested intergeneration transmission of maternal depression in the past decades, these researches limited in several aspects. First, parent-adolescent relationship is a multidimensional concept system.Maternal depression may affect adolescence depression in different ways. Second, the mediating effect of parent-adolescent relationship between maternal depression and adolescent depression is conditioned by potential moderators, such as the characteristics of the teenagers.But rarely did researches focus on this issue. Finally, the majority of previous researches have been carried out in the western culture backgrounds, and lack of examination in gender difference.Therefore, under the framework of the integrative model for the transmission of risk to children of depressed mothers, the present study aimed to investigate the relations among maternal depression, parent-adolescent relationship, negative affectivity and adolescent depression in order to comprehensively investigating the mechanism for preventing and intervening depression in family system.This studyexplored the relationships of maternal depression and adolescents' depressive symptoms, the mediating effect of mother- adolescent conflicts and cohesion, the moderating effect of adolescent negative affectivity, and gender invariance of this integrative model. To this end, 1,708 junior high school adolescents and their mothers in Jinan, Shandong province, were recruited as participants. The main conclusions of this study were as follows:(1) Maternal depression significantly predicted adolescent depression.(2) Mother-adolescent conflict and cohesion effect of maternal depression on adolescent depressive symptoms. Maternal depression effect adolescence depression in different ways, increasing mother-adolescent conflict or reducing mother-adolescent cohesion.(3) The mediating effect of mother-adolescent conflict between maternal depression and adolescent depressive symptoms is moderated by adolescent negative affectivity. For those adolescents who had higher levels of negative affectivity, mother-adolescent conflict can positively predict adolescent depressive symptoms.However, there was no significant predictive effect among those adolescents who had lower levels of negative affectivity. Besides, the moderating effect of mother-adolescent cohesion and negative affectivity was not significant, which suggested that regardless of the level of negative affectivity, mother-adolescent cohesion can negatively predict adolescent depressive symptoms.(4) There was no gender difference in the moderated mediation model for the risk to adolescent of depressed mothers.