the relation between early maladaptive schemas and suicidal ideation in girls: the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies

The present study investigated the relationship between early maladaptive schemas and suicidal ideation in girls with the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies. the research method was descriptive-correlational, and the structural equation method was used to test the relationships between variables. the population of this research was all female students studying at alzahra university of tehran in 2022. to conduct this research, 323 girls participated in this study using convenience sampling. the subjects responded to yang’s maladaptive schema questionnaire (short form), beck’s suicidal ideation questionnaire (1979), and garnefski and kraaij ’s cognitive emotional regulation questionnaire (2001). answers were received through online platforms and an electronic questionnaire. the data were analyzed in two ways: descriptive statistics using spss 26 and inferential statistics using structural equation modeling in smart pls 3. the results showed that early maladaptive schemas correlate with suicidal thoughts, adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (p=0.001). in addition, the adaptive emotion regulation strategies have no significant relationship with reducing suicidal thoughts (p=0.162). however, maladaptive emotion regulation strategies can increase suicidal thoughts. suicidal thoughts were not mediated by adaptive emotion regulation strategies, unlike maladaptive emotions regulation strategies. (p=0.142). therefore, the results of this research showed that the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies is not effective in reducing suicidal thoughts. consequently, it can be concluded that educating individuals on how to regulate their emotions while facing maladaptive strategies is more effective than addressing adaptive strategies.