A network analysis of adolescent nonsuicidal self-injury from the perspective of an invalidating family environment.

This study used network analysis to examine the conditional association structure of psychological and environmental risk factors related to nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) among adolescents in different invalidating family environments. Cross-sectional data were collected from adolescents in Northwest China (initial N = 9697). After data quality control, defensive responding screening, family-environment grouping, and propensity score matching, 3652 adolescents were included in the main analyses, with 1826 in each of the low- and high-invalidating family environment groups. We estimated separate 16-node networks including individual psychological factors, environmental risk factors, and NSSI, and conducted sensitivity analyses to examine whether the community assignment of NSSI affected bridge centrality. Network structure and global strength differed significantly between groups. Psychological resilience, impulsiveness, and cyberbullying showed relatively high absolute expected influence in both networks. NSSI had the highest bridge expected influence in the main analysis; when NSSI was assigned to the individual psychological community, its bridge centrality decreased but its relative ranking remained high. An exploratory 15-node network excluding NSSI was estimated among adolescents with NSSI in the unmatched high-invalidating group. Psychological resilience, impulsiveness, and rumination showed high absolute expected influence in this exploratory network. These findings suggest that adolescent NSSI-related risk structures may involve complex conditional associations among invalidating family environments, individual regulatory resources, impulsiveness, rumination, and bullying exposure.