Psychological Resilience Mediates the Association Between Childhood Maltreatment and Self-Harm Phenotype in Chinese Early Adolescents

Abstract

Self-harm (SH) increases signi cantly in early adolescence with great variability, and childhood maltreatment (CM) contributes to this increase. Understanding the developmental pathway from CM to SH could provide clues for SH prevention. This study used latent class analysis (LCA) to detect the phenotype of SH and explored the role of psychological resilience in the pathway from CM to SH phenotype among 5724 early adolescents (52.5% male). Three interpretable phenotypes of SH were identi ed: low SH (57.8%), medium SH (29.0%), and high SH (13.2%). Furthermore, CM was positively associated with the SH phenotype, psychological resilience mediated the association between CM and the SH phenotype (all ps < 0.01), and a larger mediating effect was observed in the medium SH (22.41%).Our ndings offer new perspectives that improving psychological resilience can be used as an e cient intervention to reduce the risk of SH among early adolescents who have experienced CM.