Mindfulness, Social Safeness and Self-Reassurance as Protective Factors and Self-Criticism and Revenge as Risk Factors for Depression and Anxiety Symptoms in Youth

Investigating protective and risk factors associated with depressive and anxious symptoms in youth is important. The current cross-sectional study aimed to explore the unique contributions of modifiable protective and risk factors associated with depressive and anxious tendencies and to identify the most important variables of this symptomatology in youth.

We applied a stepwise multiple linear regression to the data of 424 youth aged 13 to 22, who completed depression, anxiety, social safeness, mindfulness, forgiveness, self-reassurance, anger control, positive and negative affect, self-inadequacy, self-hate and revenge measures. The strongest protective factors were extracted first, followed by the next strongest factor, while controlling for the combined effect of previously extracted factors, until no significant factors were identified.

Mindfulness, social safeness and self-reassurance were the strongest and the most relevant protective factors against depressive and anxious tendencies together explaining over 40% of variance in anxiety and over 30% in depression scores. After controlling for protective factors, risk factors explained 23% of variance in anxiety and 9% in depression with self-inadequacy, revenge and negative affect being the major risks.

Our findings highlight the protective role of mindfulness, social safeness and self-reassurance against both depressive and anxious tendencies in youth, and the detrimental role of self-inadequacy and revenge. Future longitudinal studies could evaluate whether initially higher levels of mindfulness, self-reassurance and social safeness predict a decrease of depressive and anxious symptomatology over time and whether self-inadequacy and revenge predict depressive and anxious symptomatology over time. Such longitudinal investigations may inform the design and focus of experimental studies aiming at targeting depressive and anxious symptomatology in youth.