Belief in Yourself May Shield First-Year Students From Depression, Study Finds

The first semester of college is one of the most psychologically perilous transitions in modern life, and a new study suggests that the difference between thriving and sinking may come down to a single, trainable belief: confidence in one’s own competence. Researchers Vedant A. Desai of Ball State University and Niloufar A. Lueke of Austin Peay State University report in the journal Current Psychology that general self-efficacy, the trait-level belief in one’s ability to handle whatever life throws at you, appears to protect first-year undergraduates from depressive symptoms through a precisely traceable chain of events. Students with lower self-efficacy perceived more stress, coped worse with college life, and ultimately reported higher levels of depression.

The study arrives against a sobering statistical backdrop. A recent meta-analysis cited by the authors estimates that 33.6 percent of college students worldwide experience depression, while the American College Health Association reported in 2023 that 27.9 percent of American undergraduates had been diagnosed with the condition. Of those diagnosed, 76.5 percent sought mental health care within the previous twelve months. Understanding which psychological resources buffer students during this vulnerable window, therefore, has become a priority for clinicians and university administrators alike.

To map the pathway, the researchers recruited 183 traditional first-year undergraduates from a mid-sized Midwestern American university, all in their first semester, all at least eighteen and under twenty-two years of age. Transfer students and older non-traditional students were deliberately excluded to keep the sample developmentally homogeneous. The participants, 149 women and 34 men with an average age of 18.27, completed four validated instruments online: the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and the 67-item Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire. Data collection began four weeks into the Fall 2022 semester so that students had accumulated enough campus experience to appraise their stress realistically.

The analytical centerpiece was a serial mediation model, computed with the PROCESS macro for SPSS using 5,000 bootstrap samples. Unlike simpler analyses that test one link at a time, this approach evaluates an entire causal chain: does self-efficacy lower depression not directly, but by first reducing perceived stress, which in turn improves college adaptation, which then reduces depressive symptoms? The researchers grounded this chain in classic theory, drawing on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, Lazarus and Folkman’s cognitive model of stress appraisal, and Rehm’s self-control model of depression, which holds that failures of self-reinforcement and harsh self-evaluation feed depressive pathology.

The results were strikingly clean. Self-efficacy showed a strong total effect on depressive symptoms, with higher confidence predicting markedly lower depression. But once perceived stress and college adaptation were entered into the model, the direct relationship vanished entirely, dropping to statistical insignificance. In statistical terms, the finding represents full mediation: belief in one’s competence does not appear to influence depression by some separate route; it works entirely through how students appraise stress and how well they adjust to their new environment.

Each link in the chain held independently and sequentially. Higher self-efficacy predicted lower perceived stress, and lower perceived stress predicted better college adaptation, a connection the authors describe as the psychological wear and tear of feeling overwhelmed eroding a student’s capacity to integrate socially, academically, and institutionally. Poor adaptation, in turn, was the strongest single predictor of depressive symptoms in the model. The serial pathway itself was significant, with a bootstrapped confidence interval comfortably excluding zero, meaning the two-step relay from self-efficacy through stress and adjustment to depression is statistically robust in this sample.

What makes this finding potentially viral in its implications is that it reframes where intervention should occur. Many campus mental health programs target symptoms after they appear. This model suggests that depression in first-year students may develop as a consequence of functional impairment that stress creates, and that two clear intervention points exist upstream. Boosting students’ general sense of efficacy, or teaching stress-management skills that alter how demands are appraised, could short-circuit the cascade before maladaptation and depression take hold. Prior research cited by the authors points to concrete levers: teaching methods that enhance student self-efficacy, advisor and mentor programs that support adjustment, pre-college friendships that ease social integration, and cognitive behavioral therapy tailored to stress and poor college adaptation.

The study also extends a two-decade-old line of work in an important way. In 2001, Chemers and colleagues showed that perceived stress mediated the link between academic self-efficacy and college adjustment, but stopped there, treating adjustment as the endpoint. The new research goes further by using a broader trait measure of self-efficacy rather than a domain-specific academic one, and by showing that adjustment itself transmits the damage forward to mental health outcomes. The authors argue that general self-efficacy matters precisely because it governs far more than coursework, shaping social integration, emotional well-being, and psychological resilience simultaneously.

The researchers are candid about the limitations. The sample was drawn from a single psychology subject pool at one American university, was 81.4 percent female, and was predominantly White, all factors that limit generalizability. Because female students typically report higher levels of stress and internalizing symptoms, the observed pathway may be especially reflective of the female experience during the college transition, and the sample’s mean depression score on the CES-D fell at the threshold suggesting possible major depression. The cross-sectional design, self-report measures, and unmeasured confounders all prevent strong causal claims, and the authors call for longitudinal and experimental follow-ups in more diverse, gender-balanced samples, along with research into additional mediators such as self-esteem, emotion regulation, and academic performance.

Even with those caveats, the message for students, families, and universities is actionable and quietly hopeful. Self-efficacy is not a fixed endowment; decades of research show it can be cultivated through mastery experiences, modeling, and supportive instruction. Institutions that assess incoming students’ confidence levels, teach coping skills before the semester begins, and build robust mentoring structures may do more than improve retention, a serious concern given that first-year students show the highest dropout risk. They may, according to this study, measurably reduce the depression that shadows so many students through their first months on campus. The transition to college will never be stress-free, but the chain linking belief, stress, adaptation, and mood now has named links, and named links can be broken.

Subject of Research: The serial mediation of perceived stress and college adaptation in the link between self-efficacy and depressive symptoms among first-year college students

Article Title: The mediating roles of perceived stress and college adaptation in the relationship between self-efficacy and depressive symptoms among first year college students

Article References: Desai, V. A., & Lueke, N. A. (2026). The mediating roles of perceived stress and college adaptation in the relationship between self-efficacy and depressive symptoms among first year college students. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09300-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09300-5

Keywords: self-efficacy, perceived stress, college adaptation, depressive symptoms, first-year students, serial mediation, mental health, college transition, social cognitive theory, student well-being, Current Psychology, coping skills