Gratitude and hope relate to adolescent nonsuicidal self-injury: Mediation through self-compassion and family and school experiences.

TEENAGE girls; PARENT-teenager relationships; GRATITUDE; PARENT-child relationships; STRUCTURAL equation modeling; PEER relations; CHINESE people

The roles of individuals' positive characteristics on nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) have been relatively understudied. This study sought to investigate the relationships between gratitude and hope and NSSI and the mediation of positive experiences towards self and contexts (i.e., family and school) among Chinese adolescents. Participants were 1026 students from a secondary school (447 girls; Mean age = 13.76, SD = 1.27) and completed questionnaires regarding gratitude, hope, self-experience (indexed by self-compassion), family experience (reflected by family functioning, family cohesion, and parent-child relation), school experience (reflected by school engagement, peer relation, and teacher-student relation), and NSSI. The results of structural equation modeling showed that gratitude and hope worked individually but not jointly with each other through self-compassion and family experience to predict adolescent NSSI. Our findings illustrate the positive roles of gratitude and hope as well as the indirect effects of self-compassion and family experience in reducing the risk of engaging in NSSI in adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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