Your support is my healing: the impact of perceived social support on adolescent NSSI — a sequential mediation analysis.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between perceived social support and adolescent non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) behavior. 3539 adolescents were recruited to complete the Multidimensional Social Support Scale, Hope Scale, Resilience Scale for Chinese Adolescents and NSSI Scale. The results showed that perceived social support significantly negatively predicted adolescent NSSI behavior, and resilience played a mediating role between perceived social support and adolescent NSSI behavior. In addition, perceived social support could also promote the levels of adolescent resilience through hope, thereby further reducing the frequency of adolescent NSSI behavior. The results suggest that the intervention of adolescent NSSI can start from providing a safe and effective external environment. Highlights: This study revealed the internal mechanism of NSSI from the perspective of "environment-psychological ability-behavior" for the first time. The results showed that resilience played a mediating role between perceived social support and adolescent NSSI behavior. In this study, we found that hope and resilience, which are both positive psychological traits, had different influence paths on adolescent NSSI behavior. Hope needed to affect NSSI behavior by promoting resilience, but resilience could directly affect NSSI behavior. This suggested us that there may be a certain type of positive psychological quality that could protect adolescents from NSSI. From the perspective of positive development, this study explored the protective factors and their internal mechanisms that influence NSSI. On the one hand, it enriched the research on protective factors of NSSI. On the other hand, it provided a new idea for the intervention of adolescents' NSSI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]