Research On Relations Among Undergraduates' Depression, Stress, Cognitive Appraisals, Personality Traits, And Social Support

Depression is one form of affective disorder that often occurs. The prevalence of this mental problem has been increasing in recent years. As a special social group, undergraduates have been paid more and more attention to their growing depression caused by individual and social factors. Many domestic researchers have studied on issues concerning the influencing factors, whereas few specific and systematic researches have been done among non-clinical samples, which probed into the degree and the mechanism of the disorder.This paper is to conduct a survey on undergraduates' depression and make a detailed analysis on the social and psychological influencing factors, and study relations among stress, personality traits, cognitive appraisals, social support and depression, so as to find the way of preventing and removing and provide the theoretical basis for the mental health education, diagnosis and treatment of depression. Some of the instruments were adopted in this study, including Beck Depression Inventory, The Stress Rating Scale for College Students, Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, Dysfunctional Attitude Scale, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and Social Support Scale. Basing on correlative analyses, regression analyses and path analyses, we draw some conclusions as follow:1, 41.6% of the undergraduates suffer from depression to some degree, 36.9% of them are slightly depressed and 4.7% are severely depressed. There are no marked gender and grade differences, while differences resulting from subject and economic status can be seen. The BDI scores of the art students are significantly higher than that of the engineering students, and the scores of students whose family meet financial difficulty are significantly higher than that of the other students.2 , There are wide correlations between stress and depression. The depression of the undergraduates is more closely related to their studying , self-development and interpersonal relationship.3, Automatic thoughts and dysfunctional attitudes are two different level of cognitions which are significantly correlated with depression. The automatic thoughts are face cognitions based on dysfunctional attitudes and are directly correlated withdepressive symptoms.4, Neuroticism and Psychoticism are significantly positively correlated with depression. Extroversion is significantly negatively correlated with depression.5 , Social support is significantly negatively correlated with depression. Those who feel less social support subjectively are more likely to be depressed.6, Regression analysis reveals that depression is influenced by several factors either directly or indirectly. It's the result of interaction of one's Cognition, personality, and social factors. Personality, cognition, negative stress and social support have direct conductions on development of depression, the influence of cognitive and personality is highest among them.