Investigating the Structural Model of the Relationship between High-Risk Behaviors and Defense Mechanisms with the Mediation of Difficulty in Cognitive Regulation of Emotion in Secondary School Students

Risky behaviors in teenagers cause personal, social, economic problems and possibly death due to accidents, violence and crime. The purpose of this research was to investigate the structural pattern of the relationship between high-risk behaviors and defense mechanisms with the mediation of difficulty in the cognitive regulation of emotions of second-secondary students.

The correlation research method was structural equation modeling. The socio-statistics of the research was made up of all students of the second secondary school in public schools in Tehran in the academic year of 1400-1999; Among them, 250 people were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method; And they were evaluated using questionnaires of high-risk behaviors (Ahmadporterkman, 2013), defense mechanisms (Andrews et al., 2014), and emotional regulation difficulty scale (Gertz and Romer, 2004). In order to analyze data, in addition to descriptive statistics, structural equations were used at a significance level of 0.01 in SPSS-23 and 3PLS software.

The direct and negative effect of developed mechanism (P < 0.001 and β = -0.380) and underdeveloped mechanism (P < 0.001 and β = 0.400) were significant on risky behaviors. The indirect effect of the developed mechanism (β=0.059) through the difficulty in cognitive regulation of emotion on high-risk behaviors was significant. The indirect effect of neurotic mechanism (P<0.001 and β=0.075) was significant through the difficulty in cognitive regulation of emotion on risky behaviors. The results of the goodness of fit indices showed that the model had a relative fit. (R2a=0.30, Q2=0.28, and GOF=0.21).

Based on the findings of the research, the structural model of the research is suitable with the collected data, and to explain the high-risk behaviors of teenagers, the variable of defense mechanisms can be used with the mediation of difficulty in the cognitive regulation of emotion.