大学生社会比较倾向与抑郁:人际自立影响的性别差异

Social Comparison Orientation and Depression in College Students: The Role of Interpersonal Self-Support Coming from Gender Difference

为明晰大学生社会比较倾向、抑郁、人际自立和性别间的相互关系,通过对701名大学生的问卷调查。研究发现:抑郁与能力社会比较倾向显著正相关,与人际自立显著负相关。人际自立显著调节能力社会比较倾向与抑郁的关系,且存在显著性别差异。与高人际自立男生相比较,低人际自立男生能力社会比较倾向显著预测其抑郁程度。建议高校重点关注低人际自立男大学生,并及时化解他们由于社会比较产生的负性情绪,避免其陷入抑郁的'泥潭'。

Social comparison is a common phenomenon in human living.After reviewing the articles about social comparison and depression,we found that social comparison might be either the risk factor of depression,or the protecting factor against depression.Therefore,we made an inference that the relationship of social comparison and depression might be moderated by certain factors.The objective of this study was to find out the moderating factors,and to verify our hypothesis.Considering that personality is closely related to social comparison and the production and maintenance of depression,we hypothesized that personality might moderate the relationship between social comparison and depressive symptom.In addition,as personality is greatly affected by local culture,and Chinese people have their own special personality characteristics compared to Westerners,the personality should reflect features of Chinese people.Xia and Huang(2006,2008)put forward the concept of self-support personality of Chinese people,and applied the psychometric method to develop the self-support personality scale,which consisted of two dimensions of interpersonal self-support and individual self-support.In the study that followed,Xia et al(2011)proposed a theoretical viewpoint of interpersonal selfsupport as a protecting factor against depression,and verified their hypothesis through an investigative research.Based on previous studies and theories about social comparison,depression and personality,we hypothesized that social comparison might positively affect the depressive symptom level significantly,then interpersonal self-support might moderate the influence of social comparison on depressive symptom,and all these effects might have significant gender differences.Using the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure Chinese Version(INCOM-CV),Self-Supporting Personality Scale for Adolescent Students(SSPS-AS),and Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale(CES-D),we investigated 701 university students,among them 211 male students and 490 female students.The study analyzed the interaction among social comparison,depression,interpersonal self-support and gender.The results showed that:the depressive symptom level was positively correlated with the ability dimension of social comparison significantly,and negatively correlated with the interpersonal self-support remarkably.Furthermore,the multilevel moderated analysis indicated that interpersonal self-support moderated the relationship between ability dimension of social comparison and depressive symptom significantly,and there was a remarkable gender difference.These results supported our hypothesis.When further analyzing the gender difference,we found that compared to male university students with high score of interpersonal self-support,the social comparison of the male university students with low score of interpersonal self-support positively influenced their depressive symptom remarkably.However,the same effect was not observed in female university students.At present,because various awards and evaluation activities are widely carried out in colleges and universities,and college students may be placed in positive or passive social comparisons.We inferred that social comparison may be accounted a critical reason for depression of university students.According to the results of this study,we suggest that the male university students with low personal self-support should receive more attention,and we should offer immediate help to relieve them from their negative emotions caused by social comparison,in order to free them from being caught in depressive'morass'.