Personality traits: moderating role in school bullying induced depression among Chinese population

Abstract

BACKGROUND School bullying is an ever-growing problem with high prevalence all over the world. While in Hong Kong, bullying phenomenon is more worrying in school and has shown to be exacerbated in recent years. The bullying can be physical, verbal or social and is repeated over a period of time during school education. The negative impact of school bullying has been found to associate with later depression and suicidality. However, the underline mechanism involved in this relationship keeps to be unknown. Previously, the personality traits has been reported to be important predictor for symptoms of depression, with neuroticism is a risk factor for depression development and extroversion, on the other hand, is a protective factor. The current study therefore focus on bullying experience in high school and investigate whether personality traits influences the relationship between bullying experience and depression in Chinese population. METHODS In present study, 181 university students (68 male and 113 female) were recruited. High school bullying history was measured by Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire (RBQ) which covered three types of victimization (physical, verbal, and social). The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Short Form Revised Version) (EPQ-S) was applied to assess one’s personality traits. Only neuroticism/stability and extraversion/introversion was included in current study as these two dimensions were more commonly found to associate with depression. The symptom of depression was measured by the Symptom Checklist 90-R (SCL-90-R), which was a self-reported clinical rating scale. The potential role of personality traits in the relationship between school bullying and depression was tested by mediation analysis and moderator analysis separately. RESULTS Totally, 97 participants has reported that they have suffered different types of bullying in high school. For physical bullying, 10 (5.5%) participants has reported being beaten/kicked/hit and 17 participants (9.4%) reported their things were being stolen. For verbal bullying 62 (34.3%) participants received nick name and 18 (9.9%) participants were verbally threaten by others. For social bullying, 68 (37.6%) participants were being gossiped and told lies and 40 (22.1%) participants experienced social exclusion. Linear regression modeling has revealed that high school bullying experience (β=0.21, P=0.001) and personality traits (neuroticism/stability β=0.53, P<0.0001; extraversion/introversion β=-0.09, P=0.15) are associated with depression, but no mediator effect is observed. The moderator analysis has revealed a significant effect of neuroticism/stability (β=0.27, P=0.003), which suggests participants with higher neuroticism are at higher risk for school bullying induced depression. Interestingly, no moderating effect is detected for extraversion/introversion in our Chinese population. DISCUSSIONS In this Hong Kong based Chinese population, consistently with western population, high school bullying experience has demonstrated a significant association with depression. Furthermore, our results has shown a significant moderation relationship for personality traits between school bullying experience and depression. The relationship between more school bullying experience and higher degree of depression is significantly increased when considering the neuroticism/stability in the regression model. Additionally, such moderation effect is found to be from neuroticism/stability only but not extraversion/introversion in Chinese. Findings from present study will promote our better understanding of the underline pathway linking school bullying experience and depression, and imply for the important role of personality traits in mental health research.