ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1596166
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Ideas and International Perspectives on School Bullying: A Multidisciplinary ApproachView all 10 articles
School bullying and non-suicidal selfinjury a m o n g r u r a l a d o l e s cents: The mediating role of alexithymia and the moderating role of friendship quality
Provisionally accepted
- 1Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities, Tongliao, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China
- 2Yulin University, Yulin, Shaanxi, China
- 3Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, China
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This study investigates the relationship between school bullying and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in adolescents, with a particular focus on the mediating role of alexithymia and the moderating effect of friendship quality. The present study employed the Bullying Questionnaire, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Friendship Quality Questionnaire, and the Adolescent Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Assessment Questionnaire with 701 middle school students. The results indicate that (1) Student bullying significantly predicts NSSI(79.92% ) and ( 2) alexithymia partially mediated this relationship(20.08%). Moreover, (3) friendship quality was identified as a significant moderator in the relationship between student bullying and NSSI (β = -0.07, p < 0.05). Furthermore, friendship quality also moderated the relationship between alexithymia and NSSI (β = -0.003, p < 0.01). In conclusion, the study highlights the mediating role of alexithymia and the moderating role of friendship quality, providing valuable insights for psychological interventions targeting adolescent populations and adding to the social buffer theory. Friendship quality may reduce non-suicidal self-injury and alleviate the symptoms of alexithymia, which explores friendship quality as a protective factor for alexithymia.
Keywords: Qinghong Xu: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision, Writing -review & editing. Jianli Ding: Data curation, methodology, Software
Received: 19 Mar 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jing, Xu, Zhang, Ding and Li. 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: Min Li, Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, China
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