Automatic thoughts as a predictor of internalizing and externalizing problems in Chinese adolescents: A test of the cognitive content‐specificity hypothesis with age effects

Abstract

The main aim of the current study was to test the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis across internalizing and externalizing problems in Chinese adolescents. The participants consisted of 2,158 adolescents aged 11-19 years from three middle schools, and they completed a number of measures assessing a wide range of automatic thoughts and syndromes related to internalizing and externalizing problems. Multivariate regression analyses demonstrated that thoughts about social threats, personal failure and hostility were the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression, and externalizing problems, respectively. Age was a statistically significant, albeit modest, moderator of the relationship between automatic thoughts about social threat and anxiety. The current study provides support for the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis in internalizing and externalizing problems in a Chinese sample.

Rumination, automatic thoughts, dysfunctional attitudes, and thought suppression as transdiagnostic factors in depression and anxiety

“…In clinical groups, differential associations of automatic thoughts as measured by the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ; Hollon and Kendall 1980) and dysfunctional thoughts as indexed by the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS; Weissman and Beck 1978) with psychopathology was demonstrated by Hill et al (1989) that the ATQ scores were more likely to be specific to depressive symptomology; whereas, the DAS revealed a nonspecificity concerning depression. A more recent survey among 2158 Chinese adolescents showed that social-and physical-threat related automatic thoughts were predictive of anxious arousal, and dysfunctional thoughts about personal failure were associated with depressive symptomatology (Yu et al 2017). A meta-analytic structural equation modeling analysis of six affect-specific cognitive vulnerability facades of depression (pessimistic inferential style, dysfunctional attitudes, and rumination) and anxiety (anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation) identified moderate to strong correlations and a one-factor model best fit to the data on 159 effect sizes from 73 studies, suggesting a shared etiological underpinning in terms of maladaptive information processing between these two clinical entities (Hong and Cheung 2014).…”

The longitudinal relation between violence exposure in daily life, hostile automatic thoughts, and cyber‐aggression

“…The results are congruent with previous cross‐sectional studies. The previous studies indicated that children and adolescents who have higher levels of hostile automatic thoughts are prone to engage in cyber‐aggression (Revill et al, 2020; Yu et al, 2017). Moreover, anger rumination, as a kind of intrusive hostile thought has been found to be associated with aggression in college students (Zhu et al, 2020), and cyber‐aggression in adolescents (Camacho et al, 2021).…”

“…Moreover, the repetitive invasion of hostile thoughts may consume the limited cognitive resources and reduce self-control, which lead individuals to be more likely to carry out aggressive behaviors against provokers or innocent others (Denson et al, 2012). Previous studies showed hostile automatic thoughts could predict the externalizing problems (Revill et al, 2020;Yu et al, 2017). Moreover, a recent study showed negative automatic thoughts could increase the likelihood of cyber-aggression (Lu et al, 2019).…”