We explored the mediating role of self-esteem in the relationship between bullying victimization and depression among left-behind adolescents in China. The Delaware Bullying Victimization Scale, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, and the SelfEsteem Scale were used in a survey conducted with 1,204 students at four middle schools in Shandong Province, China, including 619 leftbehind adolescents and 585 non-left-behind adolescents. A significant difference was observed between these two groups: Left-behind adolescents scored significantly higher than did non-left-behind adolescents on bullying victimization and depression, and significantly lower on self-esteem. There were significant correlations between bullying victimization, self-esteem, and depression among the leftbehind adolescents. Self-esteem played a partial mediating role between bullying victimization and depression among the left-behind adolescents. The results of this study could be used as a reference for staff of schools and family members in efforts to reduce depression of left-behind adolescents.

The clustering on categorical variables has received intensive attention. In dataset with categorical features, some features show the superior performance on clustering procedure. In this paper, we propose a simple method to find such distinctive features by comparing pooled within-cluster mean relative difference and then partition the data upon such features and give subspace of the subgroups. The applications on zoo data and soybean data illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

Legal consciousness is the individual consciousness which reflects legal phenomena. Well-developed legal consciousness plays a crucial role in informing citizens of his legal right and ability to exercise these rights, therefore forms certain connections of individuals and society, and its development is a key part of individual’s socialization process. Here, we investigated the emotion aspect of legal consciousness (henceforth legal emotion) and tried to identify several factors affecting the development of legal emotion and several factors affected by legal emotion. A large sample of Chinese junior middle school students (N = 967) completed a battery of self-reported questionnaires regarding legal emotion, peer attachment, self-esteem, prosocial tendencies, and interpersonal trust. The results indicated that for early adolescents, peer attachment predicts both positive and negative legal emotion. Importantly, peer attachment affects legal emotion partially through self-esteem. We also showed that negative legal emotion acted as a mediator on the relationship between interpersonal trust and prosocial tendencies. The results provided important insights into the role of legal emotion, the emotion aspect of legal consciousness, in the social interactions and its potential psychological mechanism.

We explored the impact of experiencing childhood abuse on exhibiting aggressive behavior, and the mediating roles of self-esteem and selfcontrol in this relationship. Participants were 425 male juvenile offenders at two prisons in China, who completed the Childhood Abuse Questionnaire, the Self-Esteem Scale, the Self-Control Scale, and the Aggression Questionnaire. As we had predicted, the chain mediating effect of self-esteem and self-control on the relationship between childhood abuse and aggressive behavior was significant. The findings benefit our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between childhood abuse and aggressive behavior among juvenile offenders.

Previous studies have found that mothers' use of a negative parenting style is a risk factor for adolescent deviant peer affiliation, but it is not clear if mother rejection and overprotection affect deviant peer affiliation similarly, or if the mechanism is different for these two parenting styles. Through a survey of 856 high school students in eastern China we measured mothers' rejection or overprotection and students' violence exposure, teacher–student relationship, and deviant peer affiliation. The results showed that in the link between mother's rejection and adolescents' deviant peer affiliation, the mediating effect of both violence exposure and the teacher–student relationship was significant, and the mediating effect of the teacher–student relationship was significantly greater than that of violence exposure. In the link between mother's overprotection and adolescent deviant peer affiliation, the mediating role of violence exposure was significant. These results show that mothers' rejection and overprotection each affect adolescent deviant peer affiliation via different mechanisms and suggest that targeted interventions in adolescents' deviant peer affiliation should distinguish between rejection and overprotection.