Rationale for the Current Study

As discussed, depression is a debilitating and largely unrecognised problem in adolescents. Furthermore, adolescent depression has a large financial cost within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Knapp, Scott & Davies, 1999), with costs continuing into adult services (Knapp, McCrone, Fombonne, Beecham & Woster, 2002). Such factors highlight the public health significance of adolescent depression and the need to intervene early and effectively. According to models of coping, an effective method of preventing adolescent depression, and intervening effectively is to enhance effective coping strategies and reduce maladaptive coping strategies. From reviewing the literature it would appear that self-compassion is an

adaptive emotion-focused coping strategy, buffering against symptoms of depression in both adults and adolescents. However, less is known about why this is and

researchers have become increasingly interested in investigating the pathways underlying this relationship. The maladaptive coping strategies of avoidance and rumination have been suggested to mediate this relationship, and findings in support of this theory have been reported amongst adult samples; however this has not yet been researched in the adolescent population.

There is a need for research exploring cognitive vulnerability and protective factors in relation to depressive symptoms amongst adolescents (Abela & Hankin, 2008). Compared to adults, adolescents are at different stages of cognitive, emotional, behavioural and physical development, and it is therefore essential for promising psychological theories from adult research to be replicated amongst adolescent samples (Garber, 2000). This is important given how adolescence has been likened to a “greenhouse” for cultivating identity, life skills and compassion (Lerner, Dowling & Anderson, 2003; Roeser & Pinela, 2014). Additionally, during adolescence cognitive skills, such as emotion regulation abilities, are being mastered (e.g. Aldwin, 1994). The number of stressors requiring emotion regulation usually increase in adolescence and subsequently the use of emotion regulation strategies increase. Indeed, the coping strategies of rumination and avoidance are reported to emerge and develop during adolescent development and reflect the trajectory of depression. Therefore, exploring the underlying pathways between self-compassion and depression in adolescents is important in order to determine whether similar findings can be found to those in an adult population. Such research may inform prevention and early intervention programmes for adolescent depression.

In light of the literature reviewed, this study wished to explore a mediation model (Figure 1), already identified within the adult literature (Kreiger et al., 2013), in which brooding rumination and cognitive-behavioural avoidance mediate the relationship between self-compassion and depression in adolescents. The model suggests that a lack of self-compassion is a vulnerability factor for depression, due to promoting the generation of negative thoughts and behaviours like brooding

rumination and cognitive and behavioural avoidance, which are known to lead to and maintain depressive symptoms. Brooding rumination, and not reflective rumination, is suggested to be involved in this process due to findings from the literature showing this to be a more maladaptive form of coping, being emotion-focused rather than problem-focused (e.g. Mezulis et al., 2011; Verstraeten et al., 2011; Wyer, 1996).

Figure 1. Parallel multiple mediation model being tested (on the basis of Hayes, 2013). Adapted from “Self-Compassion in Depression: Associations With Depressive Symptoms, Rumination, and Avoidance in Depressed Outpatients,” by T. Kreiger, D. Altenstein, I. Baettig, N. Doerig and M. G. Holtforth, 2013, Behavior Therapy, 44, p. 508.

Note. Self-compassion = predictor variable, brooding rumination = mediating variable 1, cognitive-

behavioural avoidance = mediating variable 2, depressive symptomatology = outcome variable, a = indirect effect; b = indirect effect; c’ = direct effect; X = predictor variable; M = mediating variable; Y = outcome variable. X affects Y indirectly through M1 and M2.

Baron and Kenny (1986) suggest that for a mediation model to be

proposed and tested, the following three assumptions must be met; the predictor and outcome variable need to be significantly related, a significant relationship needs to exist between the predictor variable and the mediator variable, and lastly the mediator variable needs to be significantly related to the outcome variable. In order to test these conditions, the study began by examining the relationships between self-compassion (the predictor variable), depressive symptomatology (the outcome variable) and the mediating variables of cognitive-behavioural avoidance and rumination (brooding and reflection subtypes).

This is the first study to explore self-compassion and these coping strategies amongst an adolescent population and it is interesting to determine how these relate to one another in comparison to the adult literature. Additionally, the sub- scales of self-compassion were measured in order to explore how these relate to the other variables measured. This was considered important as only three studies have explored how the subscales relate to depression amongst an adolescent population (Barry et al., 2014; Mills et al., 2007; Ying, 2010). Furthermore, no other study has investigated the subscales in relation to rumination and avoidance. This research also aimed to generate a more developed understanding of the relationship between self- compassion and depressive symptoms, and to determine whether ruminative

(brooding and reflection rumination) and avoidant (cognitive-behavioural avoidance) processes mediate this relationship. Finally, with all these conditions being met, the research sought to test out a parallel multiple mediation model, which will be described below.

A cross-sectional design was chosen as it allows for the preliminary investigation of relationships between these variables within an adolescent sample

where there is limited existing research, establishing a direction for future research. Additionally, a longitudinal design would not have been achievable within the timeframe of the research. Adolescents aged 14 to 18 years were investigated due to previous research suggesting it to be a pertinent time when cognitive factors may begin to moderate the presentation of depression, with there being a nearly two-fold increase in the incidence of major depressive disorder between the ages of 13-14 years and 17-18 years (Merikangas et al., 2010).