As the highest level of academic education, graduate students’ mental health is of great significance to social development. Along with huge transformation in our country, the changes in our society and culture, intensified employment competition, and improved requirements of academic research, the responsibility and pressure of graduate students facing are very huge. Hence, graduate students’ mental health was concerned by researchers. With researches focused on growth factors of influencing graduate students’ mental health, evidence accumulated in the past decade converges on the importance of childhood abuse in students’ mental health. An increasing body of research provides evidence that childhood abuse is associated with important indicators of students’ mental health such as self-esteem and depression. However, research on the childhood abuse among Chinese graduate students is less plentiful. Besides, despite the robust relationship between childhood abuse and mental health in Chinese, the mechanism underlying this association remains less clear. To explore whether childhood abuse experiences predict higher levels of depression and lower levels of self-esteem for graduate students and examine the role of social support and emotion regulation strategies in the association. A sample of 907 graduate students were investigated with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-SF), Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS), Emotion Regulation Strategies (ERS), Self-esteem Scale (SES) and Center for Epidemiological Survey Scale (CESD). The main results of the studies were as follows. Childhood abuse was significant negative correlated with self-esteem, significant positive correlated with depression, and significant negative correlated with social support. Social support was significant positive correlated with self-esteem, significant negative correlated with depression. Examining the mediation model indicated that social support had a partial mediation effects on the relationship between childhood abuse and self-esteem. Social support had a partial mediation effects on the relationship between childhood abuse and depression. In addition, results indicated that significant indirect contributions of childhood abuse to self-esteem and depression via reappraisal, but not via suppression. The findings demonstrate the importance of childhood abuse for graduate students’ mental health and the mechanism of the relationship between childhood abuse and mental health in Chinese graduate students.
修改评论