Objective: Despite a long history of interest in personality traits and psychosis, the association between personality traits and psychotic experiences in the general population is not yet well understood. One possible factor that could influence the degree of distress from psychotic experiences is emotion regulation. The purpose of this study was to explore whether the association between personality and psychotic symptoms is already apparent in non-clinical youth as well as the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies between personality traits and psychotic experiences. Methods: Three thousand one hundred and forty seven college students were surveyed via self-report questionnaires measuring the Five-Factor model of personality, emotion regulation strategies, and psychotic experiences. Results: Neuroticism was found to be significantly positively correlated with psychotic experiences, while Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness were found to be significantly negatively correlated. Both the suppression and reappraisal strategies mediated the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that youth with certain personality traits are more likely to have psychotic experiences. The reappraisal emotion regulation strategy could serve as a protective factor against the distress of psychotic experiences.

Background: In China, since the rural labor, leaving their children in the hometown to other caregivers is a trend that has been increasing, and the impact of parental absence on the well-being of left-behind children is increasingly drawing attention in the Chinese society. However, there is a lack of study on the potential impacts of being left behind on later psychosocial outcomes in adolescence and associated protective factors. Aim: This study was conducted on a large sample of Chinese college students to test the moderating effect of resilience between left-behind experience and mental health problems. Methods: The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale and Symptom Checklist as well as a self-reported questionnaire about left-behind experience designed by the authors were adopted for a survey with 2,968 Chinese college students as respondents. Results: Totally, 1,063 students (35.8%) had 1 year or more left-behind experience. Compared to those who had no left-behind experience, the students who had left-behind experience were rated lower on resilience score and higher on mental health problem score. Mental health problems had a negative correlation with resilience. Regression analysis showed that resilience moderated left-behind experience and mental health problems. Conclusion: Individuals with left-behind experience are more vulnerable to mental health problems. Promoting resilience may be helpful for prevention of mental health problems in college students with left-behind experience.

This study examined the impact of family function and family-related factors, such as being an only child, grandparenting, income, and family relationship on the self-esteem in college students who are in the transitional period from late adolescence to emerging adulthood. The participants were 2001 Chinese college freshmen with the age from 16 to 20 years. Data were collected by using the family assessment device (FAD), the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, and self-report of family information. Comparison analysis indicated that the students from one child families, harmonious families, from families with higher income, or raised by their parents without the experience of grandparenting are more likely to show high self-esteem than their counterparts. Moreover, a multiple regression showed that dimensions of FAD such as role, communication, behavioral control, and problem solving predicted level of self-esteem of the college students, ranging from 13.2 to 17.9% variance. The results of this study showed that the self-esteem of the college freshmen is highly correlated with their family’s performance. Therefore, the program focusing on improving family functioning is needed, in order to enhance the self-esteem of the young people and hence contribute to promoting the mental health of them.

This study examines the association between family function and self-esteem of Chinese university students with grandparenting experience, and explores the moderating effects of social support in this link. Two thousand five hundred thirty university students (1372 males and 1158 females) from a Chinese university completed the Perceived Social Support Scale, the Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale, and the Family Assessment Device (FAD). Six hundred and forty-five (25.69%) students reported grandparenting experience and they reported lower scores on self-esteem and social support than the students raised only by their parents. The grandparenting group scored higher on such dimensions of family functioning as Communication, Role, Affective Involvement, Affective Responsiveness, and General Family Function (GF) than their counterpart group. For both groups, self-esteem scores were positively correlated with social support scores, while negatively correlated with FAD all sub-scale scores. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that for the students with grandparenting experience the social support moderated the relationship between GF and self-esteem. When students reported a high level of social support, those with low GF score reported higher scores in self-esteem than those with low self-esteem. However, in case of low social support, there were no differences in self-esteem between groups with high and low GF scores. These findings suggest that social support plays a positive role to relieve the adverse impact of poor family function on self-esteem of the adolescents with grandparenting experience. In addition, the significance and limitations of the results will be discussed.

Psychosocial intervention trials for youth at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis have shown promising effects on treating psychotic symptoms but have not focused on psychosocial functional outcomes, and have been conducted among help-seeking patients; there is a lack of research on nonclinical young CHR individuals. Systemic therapy is grounded in systemic-constructivist and psychosocial resilience theories. It has a number of advantages that makes it attractive for use with CHR individuals in nonclinical context. The present study evaluated the effect of systemic therapy for students at CHR on reducing symptoms and enhancing psychosocial function. This was a single-blind randomized controlled trial for CHR young people comparing systemic therapy to supportive therapy with a six-month treatment. Psychotic and depressive symptoms as well as self-esteem and social support were assessed at pre- and post-treatment. 26 CHR individuals were randomly divided into intervention group (n=13) and control group (n=13). There were no significant differences in severity of symptoms, level of social support and self-esteem at baseline between the two groups (P＞0.05). At post-treatment, significant improvement in positive and depressive symptoms as well as social support and self-esteem were observed in systemic therapy group (P <0.05); Such improvements in control group were not significant (P＞0.05). The findings indicated that systemic intervention for university students at CHR for psychosis may have positive effect on symptoms and self-esteem as well as social support in short term. More long-term research is needed to further evaluate this intervention.