| Adolescence is not only an important transition period for the individual’s physicaland mental development, but also a dangerous period of depression occurrence.Depression is one of the widespread internalizing problems among adolescents. Itaffects individual’s emotional, cognitive, interpersonal situation and physical function.Depression is also related to adolescent self-injury and suicide behavior and bringspoor prognosis in adulthood. Adolescents are in a special condition of both physical andmental development. They grow fast physically and begin to generate feelings ofadults. However, their mental development is still in the transition period from naiveto mature situation. In the face of the physical and mental development imbalancesand the increase of academic pressures, difficulty from adaptation and psychologicalconflict may appear for both healthy and hearing-impaired adolescents. Meanwhile,with the increase of independence and autonomy of adolescents, their intimacy anddependence on parents is reducing gradually, and peer relations occupy moreimportant position in their interpersonal relationships. The friendship is the mainsocial relations between adolescents peer, it has a profound influence on adolescents’social development and the whole life development. According to the existingresearch, individual’s depression was related with friendship quality, and adolescentswho have high quality friendship showed lower levels of depression and anxiety.Adolescence is a critical and transition period of individual’s self development, andprevious studies have shown that the level of the self-perception can affect theiremotional state, the lower level of the self-perception would cause psychologicaldisorders.For the hearing-impaired adolescents, on the one hand, they need to face theconflicts and contradictions coming with the fast physical development andpsychological development, on the other hand to deal with all sorts of problems fromthe physical defect of hearing and language expression. Their psychologicaldevelopment level may be lower than healthy adolescents in the same age, so the ability of social and self adaptation may present a relatively low developmental level.Besides, their life range is relatively narrow, and the lack of companions andawareness of complete information may lead to more feelings of social unfairtreatment. Then their cognition and evaluation of themselves is more likely toestablish on the basis of evaluation of society and others. All this reason may maketheir psychological fluctuation greater, thus depression would appear. There existsome obstacles in the communication between hearing-impaired adolescents and theirpeers, which may go against the full expression of information and emotion, and thenit’s difficult to form a high quality friendship. We can conclude that hearing-impairedadolescents may experience more pressure than healthy adolescents, and feel moredepression.The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D),Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC) and the General Alienation Scale (GAS)were administered on600healthy participants and422with impaired hearing toexplore that the characteristic of adolescents’ depression, friendship quality andself-concept and the relationship between the two groups, and to find out that whetherthe self-concept could mediate the relationship between the quality friendship anddepression of healthy and hearing-impaired adolescents. And we compared themedium effect between the two groups. This study would provide scientifictheoretical basis for adolescents’ mental health education. Then, the results of thisstudy can help the intervention in the later period as guidance and reference for bothhealthy and hearing-impaired adolescents.Conclusions were as follows:1. Hearing-impaired adolescents reported higher level of depression than healthyones, and the female higher than the male. The friendship support from healthyadolescents was significantly higher than hearing-impaired ones, and on thedifference between male and female, the male’s friend accompany was higher than thefemale, but the female’s friends emotional support and intimacy were higher than themale. The physical self-concept meant the self-perception and self-evaluation ofindividual’s sports ability and participation. Results were as follows: Physicalself-concept of healthy adolescents was significantly higher than the hearing-impairedones. And for healthy adolescents, the male’s physical self-concept was higher thanthe female, but for hearing-impaired ones, there was no difference on the physicalself-concept between male and female. 2. Both for healthy and hearing-impaired adolescents, depression was significantlynegatively correlated with their friendship support and self-concept, and significantlypositively correlated with conflict between friends. However, for healthy adolescents,there was a positive correlation between friendship support and self-concept, butconflict between friends was not correlated with self-concept; For hearing-impairedadolescents, there was a positive correlation between friendship support andself-concept, besides of intimacy in friendship support, and conflict between friendswas negatively correlated with self-concept.3. For healthy adolescents, friends support had an negative effect on theirdepression partly through the self-concept; For hearing-impaired adolescents, friendsconflict had an positive effect on their depression partly through the self-concept. |
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