Academic self-condemnation, maladaptive emotion regulation, and NSSI-related risk cognition in chinese adolescents: a three-wave cohort study

Background Academic pressure is a salient developmental context in Chinese adolescence, but longitudinal evidence is limited on how academic difficulty is internalized as shame-based self-evaluation and linked to later non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) risk cognition. Methods The study involved 3,734 secondary school students from Zhejiang Province, China, of whom 2,915 completed assessments at baseline (T1), 6 months (T2), and 12 months (T3). The primary complete-case analysis included 2,854 adolescents across 134 classes. We examined the prospective relationships from T1 shame and guilt proneness to T2 academic self-evaluative burden and cognitive emotion regulation, as well as from these T2 variables to T3 future likelihood of NSSI, conceptualized as NSSI-related risk cognition. Results T1 Shame-NSE was associated with higher T2 academic self-evaluative burden (β = 0.102, 95% CI [0.066, 0.138]). Academic burden was contemporaneously associated with catastrophizing (β = 0.176, 95% CI [0.133, 0.220]) and self-blame (β = 0.234, 95% CI [0.191, 0.277]), and all three T2 constructs were independently associated with higher T3 self-reported future NSSI likelihood (ORs = 1.19–1.22). Shame-Withdraw, the guilt facets, and rumination showed no independent T3 associations in simultaneous models. In the exploratory behavioral analysis, academic burden was also associated with newly reported T3 past-year NSSI (OR = 1.40, 95% CI [1.09, 1.79]). Conclusions The findings refine broad academic-pressure accounts by identifying academic self-condemnation as a domain-specific correlate of later NSSI-related risk cognition, alongside self-blame and catastrophizing. This pattern offers a testable school-linked formulation hypothesis.