Cognitive Vulnerability To Depression Of Adolescence

Depression is a widespread mental illness, with kinds of syndromes and subtypes. Psychologists and psychiatrists find the cognition of depressive individuals differs obviously from that of the ordinary. So some cognitive tendency is considered vulnerable to the cause and remaining of depression —called cognitive vulnerability to depression. Based on cognition theory of depression, the purpose of our research is to exploring three cognitive aspects of depressive individuals: self-cognition, attitudes/beliefs and cognitive-emotional regulation strategy in order to generate a comprehension of adolescence's cognitive vulnerability to depression.The subjects of the research are junior middle school students in grade 2 in different degrees of depression, including the depressive and the ordinary. We explore their implicit and explicit processing features and the association. Three approaches: implicit self-esteem, explicit self-esteem, dysfunctional attitudes/beliefs and cognitive-emotional regulation strategy are searched, from which attempt to find the cognitive vulnerability in the cause and remaining of adolescence's depression.We get such results:(1) Consistent with former research,low explicit-esteem is associated closely with depression; implicit self-esteem is universal positive but higher in depressive group, especially in specific-implicit. The distance between degrees of one's explicit and implicit self-esteem is found to related closely to depression. (2)We also find that depressive subjects have seriously beliefs of perfectionism and approval dependency, and these beliefs are related to the distance of ex-implicit self-esteem.(3)The results also show that under negative or stressful situation, such strategies: self-blame, catastrophing and emotion-inhibition (expression problem) and rumination, lack of planning focusing are relatively closely to depression, as important features. Regression analysis finds that regulation strategies act as a mediator between dysfunctional beliefs and depression. Based on these results, the article gets the conclusion:Depressive adolescence show low explicit self-esteem and too high implicit self-esteem, forming a confliction in ex-implicit self-cognition. The explicit self-esteem can predict effectively the depression tendency. The high dysfunction beliefs of perfectionism and approval dependency of depressive adolescence are related to self-recognition. The tendency to prefer to more negative strategies is a cognitive feature of depression subjects. Strategies are influenced by dysfunctional beliefs and act as the mediator between beliefs and depression. These interactive aspects and their associations form a mechanism which can analysis effectively to a large extent some cause and reminding process of depression concerning specific situation.In general, the research considers the cognitive vulnerability as a mechanism to analysis processing of cause and remaining of depression concerning specific situation.