The Structural Equation Modeling of Personality Organization and Object Relations with Interpretation Bias with Role Mediator of Meta-emotion and Sensory Processing Sensitivity in Depressed Students

Depression is one of the most common chronic diseases among people with high levels of comorbidity with other mental disorders. The interpretation of bias in depression has been well studied, so that depressed people tend to decipher or recall negative information more easily than positive or neutral information. Researchers have suggested that information processing and interpretive bias are associated with the development and persistence of emotional disorders. Because the stimuli and events around us are rarely overtly positive or negative, the interpretive process is critical to how information is stored in memory, and negative interpretive biases are an underlying mechanism for depressive disorders. This interpretive bias is influenced by various variables, one of the most important of which can be personality organization, a concept that Kronberg proposed based on the framework of object relations theory. The purpose of this study was to structural equation modeling of personality organization and object relations with interpretation bias with role mediator meta–emotion and sensory processing sensitivity in depressed students.

The research method was analytical correlational by structural equation modeling. The statistical population of the present study was the students of Islamic Azad University Urmia branch, Urmia City, Iran, in the academic year 2019–2020. In this study, according to convenience sampling method, 200 depressed students were selected as samples and they were asked to answer the Revised Beck Depression Inventory–II (Beck et al., 1988), Inventory of Personality Organization (Lenzenweger et al., 2001), Bell Object Relations Inventory (BORI) (Bell et al., 1986), Ambiguous Scenarios Test–Depression (AST–D) (Berna et al., 2011), Meta–Emotion Scale (MES) (Mitmansgruber et al. (2009), and Highly Sensitive Person Scale (Aron and Aron, 1997). Among those who answered the questionnaires, 200 students who scored Score higher than 10 on Beck Depression Inventory–II were selected. The Explore command in SPSS program was used to investigate the outliers in the present study; the results of the study of outages in the variables of the present study showed no outages in any of the research variables. Data were analyzed at descriptive and inferential levels. At the descriptive level, mean and standard deviation were used to measure the research variables. At the inferential level, the Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling were used to investigate the relationships between variables. Data analysis software was SPSS version 24 and AMOS version 24, at a significance level of 0.05.

The present study results indicated that the path coefficient between personality organization (β=–0.457, p=0.012), object relations (β=–0.098, p=0.008), meta–emotion (β=–0.336, p<0.001) and sensory processing sensitivity (β=–0.205, p<0.001) with interpretation bias was negative and significant. Also, indirect paths of personality organization and object relations with interpretation bias through mediating role of meta–emotion and sensory processing sensitivity were significant. The goodness of fit indices supported the optimal fit of the research model with the collected data (X2/df=2.488, NFI=0.911, GFI=0.907, IFI=0.913, AGFI=0.901, CFI=0.908, and RMSEA=0.063).

Based on the findings of this study, meta–cognition and sensory processing sensitivity play a mediating role in the relationship between personality organization and object relationships with the interpretation bias of depressed people. Also, the structural model of the research and satisfactory with research data and is an important step in identifying the factors that are effective in interpretation bias in depressed students.