INVESTIGATION OF THE MEDIATING ROLE OF EMOTION REGULATION IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS AND DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, STRESS IN ADOLESCENCE

Abstract

The current study aims to determine whether emotion regulation strategies have a mediating role in the relationship between adolescents' frequency of using automatic thoughts and their depression, anxiety, and stress levels. In addition to this, another aim of the study is to determine whether depression, anxiety and stress levels differ according to socio-demographic characteristics such as gender and type of school attended. The research study group consists of 395 high school students living in Diyarbakır city center and continuing their education in various schools. The data was collected through "Personal Information Form", “Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ-N)", “Adolescent Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (AERQ)", "Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS) ". The relationship between gender and school type variables and depression, anxiety, stress levels were obtained using the T-Test. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to examine the relationship between the variables, and the regression-based bootstrapping method was used to investigate the mediation effect of the applied model. According the results obtained, it was determined that the levels of depression, anxiety and stress differed statistically significantly according to the gender and school type variable. When the difference was examined, it was found that the depression, anxiety and stress scores of female students were statistically significantly higher than male students. According to another result obtained within the scope of the research, the depression and anxiety scores of the students attending public school were determined to be higher than the students attending private school. However, internal dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies were found to mediate the relationship between automatic thoughts and depression and anxiety. According to the results, it was determined that internal-dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies mediated the relationship between automatic thoughts, and depression and anxiety. The relationship between automatic thoughts and stress seems mediated by internal emotion regulation strategies and external dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies.