Association of cognitive emotion regulation strategy with depression and anxiety among high school students

Objective To explore the relationship between depression,anxiety and cognitive emotion regulation strategy among high school students.Methods Totally 648 senior high school students were selected with stratified random cluster sampling from 7 middle schools in 6 municipalities or prefectures in Hebei province and were self-administered with Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire,Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) between March and April 2014.Results Of the students,24.69% (160) reported depressive symptoms;4.0% (26) reported anxiety symptoms;21.9%(142)reported both anxiety and depressive symptoms;and 49.4%(320)reported neither depression nor anxiety.Linear regression analysis showed that rumination and catastrophization were positively correlated with depression and anxiety (both P<0.05);positive imagination was reversely correlated with depression and anxiety (both P<0.05).Compared with the students with anxiety symptoms,the students with depression symptoms were less likely to adopt positive adjustment (11.97±3.84 vs.14.15±2.98,P<0.05)and positive imagination (22.83±6.29 vs.27.63±5.28,P<0.05);whereas,the students with anxiety symptoms were more likely to adopt blame on others (9.80±3.35 vs.8.91±3.12,P<0.05) compared to the students with depression symptoms.Moreover,the students with comorbidity of anxiety and depression were more likely to adopt rumination (mean-square deviation:11.08±2.63 vs.9.55±2.68 and 8.87±2.47,both P<0.05),self-consolation (6.52±4.29vs.5.00±2.15 and 4.77±1.73,both P<0.05),and catastrophization (12.28±3.80 vs.10.15±4.08 and 9.27±3.43,both P<0.05) compared to the students only with anxiety or depression.Conclusion Specific training on cognitive emotional regulation may decrease the occurrence of anxiety and depression symptoms among adolescent students.