A Study On Social Information Processing Of Middle School Students With Depressive Symptoms

Depressive symptoms is one kind of the adolescent depressive symptoms and is one of the common factors influencing mental health of middle school students. Adolescent depressive occurrence, development, diagnosis, treatment and intervention have been studied from physiology, psychology and society. These have furthered peoples' knowledge of adolescent depression, supplied some theoretical explanation and methodological guidance to people's the precaution and interference of adolescent depression. However, the studies of this field are mainly focussed on clinical adolescent depressive basic cognition process, characteristics of social development, and the changes of neurotransmitter or neuroendocrine et al. Besides, specific and systematic researches into the social information processing of depressive symptoms of middle school students have never appeared.This study explores the influencing factors, social information processing, and serum levels of cytokines of middle school students'depressive symptoms by adopting scales, path analyses, social cognition experiments and radioimmunology methods. This study has three parts, including ten studies dealing with prevalence, development characteristics, influencing factors, serum levels of four cytokines and encoding, recalling and priming of social information processing on depressive symptoms of middle school students. The results of this study bring about the following conclusions:1.The prevalence of middle school students, depressive symptoms is 42.3%, with gender and school differences emerging.2.The level of middle school students depressive symptoms increases along with their age and grades; 13 is the critical age, and Grade 2 of Junior school is the critical grade; there are sharp gender differences at some age and grades.3.The development of depressive symptoms can be predicted by six factors such as negative automatic thoughts, learning proficiency, health status, interpersonality, school types, and parental education.4.School factors and negative automatic thoughts have direct functions on development of depressive symptoms; family and self-developing factors have indirect functions on middle school students' depressive symptoms.5.There are negative bias of encoding, recalling, recognition and priming in middle school students' depressive symptoms.6.There is situational congruence in the recalling of social information processing of the students depressive symptoms.7.The recognition of social information processing of the students depressive symptoms is related to the level-of-processing.8.The negative priming of the social information processing of the students depressive symptoms is mainly caused by the negative bias of processing of the negative items and the neutral items.9.The serum levels of interleukin-2 (IL-2), interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) in middle school students with depressive symptoms is significantly lower than that in control group; the development of depressive symptoms can be predicted by three cytokines.10.Combining social cognition and information processing and radioimmunology is reliable experimental methods in studying middle school students with depressive symptoms.The theoretical value of this study lies in, its further study of social information processing from a basic cognitive process, of non-clinical samples from clinical samples, and the combining study of epidemiology and immune cytikine, enriching and developing social information processing, immunology and developmental characteristics in nonclinlic adolescent depression, exploring the characteristics of the changes of the levels of immune cytikine and the cognitive traits and its significance, thus paving a new approach of adolescent depression studies. In practice, the findings of the study contribute to mental health education, diagnosis, treatment and intervention of adolescent depression, and quality education of middle school students.