Interpersonal emotion regulation and family functioning in the relationship between anhedonia and depressive symptoms in adolescents: a moderated mediation model

A questionnaire survey was conducted with 1,635 students from two secondary schools in Hunan Province to examine the statistical roles of interpersonal emotion regulation and family functioning in the relationship between anhedonia and depressive symptoms in adolescents. The results showed that (1) after controlling for grade and gender, anhedonia was significantly and positively associated with depressive symptoms; (2) a continuous-variable model based on the full sample indicated a significant partial mediating effect of interpersonal emotion regulation on the association between anhedonia and depressive symptoms; and (3) family functioning moderated the association between anhedonia and interpersonal emotion regulation, such that lower family functioning scores (i.e., healthier family functioning) were associated with stronger conditional indirect effects linking anhedonia to depressive symptoms through interpersonal emotion regulation. When BDI-II-C Items 4 (loss of pleasure) and 12 (loss of interest) were removed from the depressive symptom total score and the analyses were repeated, the main results remained stable. An exploratory sensitivity analysis using the BDI-II-C cutoff revealed a significant mediating pathway in the below-cutoff group, whereas the regression association between interpersonal emotion regulation and depressive symptoms was not significant in the at-or-above-cutoff group. Given that grouping by the cutoff of the same dependent variable narrows the within-group score range and may affect within-group regression estimation, these subgroup results are reported only as exploratory sensitivity analyses. These findings suggest that interpersonal emotion regulation and family functioning are important factors in understanding the statistical association between anhedonia and depressive symptoms in adolescents.