Predicting Student Depression With Measures of General and Academic Anxieties

Abstract

Universities are increasingly cognizant of the importance of attending to the psychological and emotional needs of undergraduate learners, recognizing that anxiety and depression have significant negative impacts on student retention and success. The focus of the current study was to evaluate the connections among various forms of anxiety and examine the relationships these indicators of anxiety have with depression. The results demonstrated that a broad measure of neuroticism was a meaningful predictor for depression. However, precision in detecting depressive symptoms was improved when examining an additional measure specifically focused on academic anxiety. The results provide support for a nested model of anxiety, which suggests that broad neuroticism, then academic anxiety, and finally test anxiety are progressively more specific manifestations of anxiety in university students. The collection of these findings provide early indication of avenues that may support learners who are beginning to exhibit signs of emotional distress, potentially reducing the tendency to progress from a contextual anxiety response to more serious mental health concerns.

Effects of Levels of Self-Regulation and Regulatory Teaching on Strategies for Coping With Academic Stress in Undergraduate Students

“…In the university context, due to the difficulty of meeting the demands and requirements of study, the experience of stress is an important phenomenon that has captured research interest (Martín et al, 2003;Cabanach et al, 2007;Willcoxson et al, 2011;D'Mello, 2013;Pidgeon and Pickett, 2017;Scharp and Dorrance, 2017). Research on academic stress in this context, from the perspective of Clinical and Health Psychology, has prioritized individual predictive or explanatory factors, with particular focus on differentiating factors like personality variables, anxiety, or cognitive differences (Palmer and Rodger, 2009;Saklofske et al, 2012;Dicke et al, 2018;Cassady et al, 2019). From an Educational Psychology perspective, however, it seems reasonable to approach the study of stress as a contextualized phenomenon within the teaching-learning process (Mainhard et al, 2018).…”

Associations Between Social Capital and Depressive Symptoms Among College Students in 12 Countries: Results of a Cross-National Study

“…Depressive symptoms were measured using the Simplified Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-S) (Schmitt and Maes, 2000). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), in general, is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring depression and has excellent psychometric properties, including high internal consistency (α = 0.92) and demonstrated a lack of racial bias in university settings (Cassady et al, 2019). Measuring depressive symptoms in the university setting has been widely used and replicated by other authors (Cassady et al, 2019).…”

Self-Regulation and Regulatory Teaching as Determinants of Academic Behavioral Confidence and Procrastination in Undergraduate Students

“…In formal academic situations, such as the university, it seems reasonable that the variables we study would be jointly determined by learner characteristics as well as by the design and implementation of the teaching process ( Cabanach et al, 2007 , 2013 ; Chartier et al, 2011 ; Alonso-Tapia et al, 2018 ; Gentsch et al, 2018 ; Cassady et al, 2019 ). Previous theoretical models have adopted this idea.…”