Association Between Academic Stress And Depression In Junior Middle School Students

With the changes of The Times,the progress of living standards,mental health has become a more and more important topic,and the depression has become one of the most troubling psychological problems.Depression seriously affects people’s work,study,daily life and social interactions.Therefore,more and more scholars have carried out researches on depression,and numerous investigations have found that academic pressure is one of the important factors inducing students to suffer from severe depression(Sun Luwen,2021).And for junior middle school students,the majority of those who sought psychological counseling were depressed at the school where the researcher worked.In these students,the problem of feedback out reason mostly has a lot to do with the heavy study pressure.And from various subjects teachers’ personal interview,the author has also learned that the students’ learning pressure is really large,learning tasks are really heavy,learning competition is indeed intense,and the learning intensity is truly bigger.In addition,our school has carried out the Saturday after-school service policy for the recent years.So students still need to attend school for a whole day on Saturday,which increases their learning intensity and burden virtually.Therefore,the students feel more stressed than before.At the same time,some scholars found that in the face of these stressful events,the level of self-efficacy of emotion regulation determines whether individuals can take better measures to deal with these stressful events,thus effectively reducing the negative impact of stressful events on themselves(Liu Xia,Tao Sha,2005).Therefore,based on previous studies,this project attempts to prove that emotional regulation self-efficacy exists in a way of regulating academic stress and depression,and tries to improve students’ emotional regulation self-efficacy,and help them better regulate their emotions to adapt to the depression caused by academic pressure,so as to reduce their depression level.In the first study,700 junior high school students from S middle school in Shizhu County,Chongqing municipality were selected as the subjects,and a total of686 valid questionnaires were obtained through sorting out and screening the invalid questionnaires.The secondary School Students’ Academic Stressors Scale,Emotional regulation Self-efficacy Scale and CES-D Depression Scale used by the Research Center were adopted.To their academic stress,depression and mood regulation self-efficacy in the investigation,the results showed that:(1)the junior middle school students academic stress,depression and the emotion regulation self-efficacy and its two dimension all show significant differences in gender.The girls’ academic pressure,depression level and POS were higher than the boys,and the male students’ emotional regulation self-efficacy and NEG was higher than the female students.(2)There were no significant differences in academic pressure,depression and the emotional regulation self-efficacy and its two dimensions oamong junior high school students in grade and whether they were the only child or not.In the second study,the subjects and research tools selected in study 2were the same as those in study 1.The study on the relationship among academic stress,depression and emotional regulation self-efficacy showed that,(1)the academic stress and depression were significantly positive correlate in junior middle school students.(2)There was a significant negative correlation between academic stress and two dimensions of emotional regulation self-efficacy,namely,POS and NEG.(3)The emotional regulation self-efficacy and its two dimensions were negatively correlated with the depression.(4)The emotion regulates self-efficacy plays a moderating role in the relationship between academic stress and depression,and the NEG has a regulatory effect,but POS has no regulatory effect.In the third study,96 students in grade one of S Middle School in Shizhu County,Chongqing were further selected based on the mechanism of the three variables confirmed in Study 2.They are divided into experimental group and control group.Group psychological counseling with emotion regulation as the theme was adopted and 48 students from the experimental group were selected for group psychological counseling intervention.The results showed that,(1)before the intervention,there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in POS and NEG and depression scores,so the subjects in the experimental group and the control group were homogeneous.(2)After the intervention,the experimental group and the control group in POS and NEG and depression levels were significantly different,and the POS and NEG in the experimental group are higher than the control group,the levels of depression were lower in the experimental group than in the control group.(3)Before and after the experiment,the POS and NEG in the experimental group were significant differences.(4)Before and after the experiment,the POS and NEG and the depression level had no significant difference in the control group.The conclusions:(1)The academic stress,depression and self-efficacy of emotion regulation are above medium level in junior high school students.(2)There are significant gender differences in academic pressure,depression and regulatory emotional self-efficacy and its each dimension of junior high school students,but no significant differences in grade or whether only child or not.(3)There was a significant positive correlation between academic stress and depression in junior high school students.Regulatory emotional self-efficacy and its each dimension was negatively correlated with depression.There was a significant negative correlation between academic stress and regulatory emotional self-efficacy.(4)The emotional regulation self-efficacy plays a moderating role in the relationship between academic stress and depression of junior high school students,among which NEG has a moderating role but POS has no moderating role.(5)The group psychological counseling based on emotion regulation can Improve the emotional regulation self-efficacy of junior high school students and reduce the depression level of junior high school students.