The Role Of Rumination And Stressful Life Events In The Relationship Between The Constitutions And Depression In Women

Objective: Depression is one of the most common psychiatric problem.Measured by years lost to disability,depression accounts for the biggest share of the world's burden of disease.Studies have found clear gender differences in the prevalence of depressive disorders.It is even more common among women than among men.The pathological constitutions are associated with depression in traditional Chinese medicine.However,most of these studies are cross-sectional studies.What's more,it is unclear “how” and“under what circumstances” the pathological constitutions affect the depression.Therefore,it is important for us to prevent and intervene depression by studying the risk factors and the mechanism of it.Methods: This study combines the theory of Chinese medicine with clinical psychology.The Constitution Scale,Ruminative Response Scale,Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Checklist are used to assess this association in 725 female college students and track this association in 527 female college students about 12 months apart.This study examine the relation between the pathological constitutions and depression through a Logistic regression and to explore the possible causality through cross-lagged analysis.To explore the mediating effect of rumination and the moderating effect of stressful life events,the moderated-mediation model is established.The results:(1)The constitutional types will affect the status of depression in female college students: The gentleness type as a protective factor and qi stagnant type,qi deficient type does as risk factors.Susceptible constitutions among the women college students demonstrated stability to some extent.Cross-lagged regression analysis indicated that susceptible constitutions predicted Time 2 depression with Time 1 depression controlled,but Time 1 depression do not predict Time 2 susceptible constitutions with Time 1 susceptible constitutions controlled.(2)The longitudinal and cross-sectional studies show that rumination is a partial mediator of the relationship between the pathological constitutions and depression.Specifically,rumination acts as a mediator between qi stagnant constitution and depression and qi deficient constitution and depression.(3)The results of the longitudinal and cross-sectional studies in the moderating effect of stressful life events are inconsistent.The cross-sectional and longitudinal studies shows that the stressful life events moderate the direct effect between the qi stagnant constitution and depression.However,the crosssectional study shows that the stressful life events moderate the indirect effect between the susceptible constitution and depression but not longitudinal study.Conclusion: Therefor,the gentleness type is a protective factor for depression,pathological constitutions is an important cause of women depression.The effect of pathological constitutions on women depression is moderated mediating effect.This study provides a significance basis for prevention interventions and theoretical research in women depression.