A study on the symptomatic association between depressive symptoms and rumination in college students–based on latent profile analysis and network analysis

Abstract

Background In recent years, depressive symptoms are common among college students worldwide and constitute an important public health concern, with their associated disease burden drawing increasing attention from researchers and public health practitioners. Although rumination has been widely recognized as a key cognitive vulnerability factor for depressive symptoms, it is often conceptualized as a unitary construct, thereby neglecting the functional distinctions and potential heterogeneity across different emotional contents (e.g., sadness and anger) embedded within the ruminative process. Accordingly, a re-examination of the association linking emotion-specific rumination to depressive symptoms at the symptom level, from an emotion-specific perspective, is warranted. Methods A total of 8,729 college students completed the Anger and Sadness Rumination Questionnaire and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted using item-level indicators to identify heterogeneous response profiles. A regularized partial-correlation network was then estimated within the elevated-depressive-symptom profile using 22 rumination items and one aggregate PHQ-9 total-score node. Gender-group networks were compared using the Network Comparison Test. Results The LPA identified three distinct and heterogeneous profiles: an elevated-depressive-symptom profile characterized by high anger rumination and low sadness rumination, a low-depressive-symptom profile characterized by low anger rumination and high sadness rumination, and a moderate-depressive-symptom profile with moderate levels of rumination. Within the elevated-depressive-symptom profile, several anger- and sadness-rumination items showed relatively high observed expected-influence estimates in a network comprising 22 rumination items and one aggregate PHQ-9 total-score node. These findings represent conditional associations between rumination items and overall depressive-symptom severity rather than a network among individual depressive symptoms. Exploratory gender-stratified analyses suggested descriptive differences in node centrality patterns. Conclusion The findings underscore substantial heterogeneity in depressive symptom and rumination patterns among college students and highlight the relative prominence of several emotion-specific rumination items within the estimated network. These findings emphasize the value of distinguishing emotion-specific rumination processes and integrating latent profile and network approaches to better characterize the complexity of depressive symptom patterns among college students.