ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1532502
Analyzing latent categories of stress, anxiety, and depression in medical students: insights into their psychological resilience
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Medicine, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, Macao, SAR China
- 2Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
- 3Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
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Objective: To explore the potential effects of demographic variables and three factors of psychological resilience, tenacity, strength, and optimism on the stress, anxiety, and depression of medical students, and to provide data support for the refinement of mental health interventions. Method: A total of 1099 junior medical students were selected from a certain medical college and surveyed using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21 Chinese version) and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale(CD-RISC Chinese version), as well as a self-designed demographic questionnaire. Data processing was conducted using latent category analysis, contingency table analysis, logistic regression, and other methods. Result: Three subgroups for stress and depression, and two subgroups for anxiety were obtained. Contingency table analysis results showed that the correlation coefficients between the subgroups and severity were all greater than 0.6. In normal and mild symptomatic populations, latent category analysis fitted the low stress subgroup and the depression subgroup with insufficient motivation. The logistic regression results showed that family atmosphere and subjective socio-economic status had significant predictive effects on stress, anxiety, and depression subgroups. Optimism only had a significant predictive effect on the stress subgroup, while boarding only had a significant impact on the anxiety subgroup. Left-behind experience and gender only had significant predictive effects on the depression subgroup. Limitations: The explanatory power of cross-sectional studies and non random sampling is limited, and the universality and misrepresentations of the results need further verification.Conclusion: There was significant group heterogeneity in the manifestations of stress, anxiety, and depression among medical students, and the behavioral response patterns of subgroups with latent categories exhibited cross group characteristics when grouped by the norm. The impact of tenacity, strength, and optimism on subgroups of stress, anxiety, and depression varied. Future research should integrate different research paradigms, deepen understanding, and provide more targeted evidence support for psychological education and intervention programs for medical students.
Keywords: latent category analysis, psychological resilience, Medical students, stress, Anxiety, Depression
Received: 10 Dec 2024; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lei, Jiaming, Bin, Lyu, Junrong, Lam and Yufei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chen Yufei, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, 510006, Guangdong Province, China
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