Experimental Study On The Depressive Schemata Of College Student

According to Beck's theory of depression, depressive schemata has an important role in the etiology,development and maintenance of depressive episode. Among the researches of depressive schemata, many of them used self-reported inventory which was prone to be influenced by subjective awareness. The experimental researches on the cognitive processes offer more efficient measures of depressive schemata. Sociotropic personality serves as an important vulnerability factor in the etiology of depression. So this research tested depressive schemata and its composition through cognitive processes of participants.This research used CED-S and SAS to test 500 college students, and finally screened 24 depressed, 12 anxious, 17 depressed and anxious, 24 controlled college students to take part in the experiment.The prior experiment strictly developed 4 sets of positive trait,positive state,negative trait,negative state interpersonally oriented adjectives. The experiment used 4(groups: depressed vs. anxious vs. depressed and anxious vs. controlled )×2(valence: positive vs. negative )×2(stability: trait vs. state) mixed design, to research the cognition processing differences among 4 groups through self-referent encoding task(SRET) and affective stroop task (EST).The results:(1) The result of SRET's self-descriptive shows: valence and group have a significant interaction effect, the self-descriptive for positive adjectives'number of depressed group is significantly larger that negative adjectives(p<0.001); for positive trait,positive state adjectives ,the self-descriptive numbers of depressed group is smaller that controlled group(p<0.01,p<0.001); and for negative trait,negative state adjectives, the self-descriptive numbers of depressed group is significantly larger than controlled group(p<0.001,p<0.001).(2) For state adjectives, the SRET's positive reaction time bias of depressed group is significantly lower than controlled group(p<0.05), and EST's color naming reaction time bias of depressed group is significantly lower than controlled group.The conclusion:(1) The result of SRET's self-descriptive suggests that depressed college students'self schemata have positive components.(2) From the result of SRET's positive reaction time bias and EST's color naming reaction time bias, it is concluded that depressed college students have a negative sociotropic schemata with state content.