The Effects Of Life Events On Junior High School Students' Self-Harm Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

Self-harm behavior is especially prevalent among adolescents.Determinant factors and mechanisms in adolescents' self-harm behavior have been always the important question concerned by experts and scholars at home and abroad.Basing on previous studies,we discover that environmental factors and individual characteristics factors are often seen as determinants of self-harm behavior development.Environmental factors not only act on the formation of self-harm behavior directly,but also have an impact on self-harm behavior through the interaction with individual characteristic factors.In addition,parent-adolescent relationship was an important protective factor for adolescents' aggressive behavior which can buffer the influence from the environmental factors.A massive literature documents the association between life events and adolescents' self-harm behavior,but little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this relation.This study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine whether the self-criticism would work as mediated effect between the life events and Junior self-harm behavior,and whether the mediated effect of Juniors' self-criticism could be moderated by parent-adolescent relationship.With simple random sampling method,333 junior high school students(mean age=13.56±1.05 years,189 boys and 144 girls)completed questionnaire measures of the Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Check List,the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire,Family Adaption and Cohesion Evaluation Scales,Adolescents Self-Harm Scale.Utilizing SPSS 20.0 to examine reliability analysis,descriptive statistics,difference tests,correlation analysis and analyze the data with hierarchical regression and moderation,mediation.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Among the participants,the percentage of self-harm behavior is 75.4%,the level of self-harm has relations with grade.(2)After controlling for gender,grade,age and so on,life events had a significant positive prediction for junior school student self-criticism and self-harm behavior.With increased life events,middle school student self-criticism had significantly enhanced and self-harm behavior had significantly increased.(3)The self-criticism mediated the relationship between life events and self-harm behavior.(4)The relationship between junior school student life events and self-criticismbehavior(during the first half of the mediation effect)was moderated by parent-adolescent relationship.The present study enriched the theory of adolescent self-harm behavior by confirming the moderating role of parent-adolescent relationship and self-criticism in the relationship between life events and self-harm behavior.The implications of the results in designing effective prevention intervention program for preventing adolescents' mental health problems and facilitating adolescents' positive development were also addressed in the present study.