Differential Pathways to Depressive Symptoms in Students With and Without Special Educational Needs: The Role of Emotional Reactivity and Parent-Teacher Relationships

Social and emotional competence (SEC) is a core target of school-based social and emotional learning (SEL), yet learner variability may alter how relational experiences and emotion-regulation difficulties are associated with mental-health outcomes. Depressive symptoms were treated as clinically meaningful indicators of psychological distress and, within an SEL-oriented framework, as downstream correlates of difficulties in emotional self-management; they were not treated as interchangeable with low SEC. Participants were 465 Greek students aged 10-14 years (160 in the combined SEN group-94 with documented status and 66 identified by teacher screening-and 305 without SEN) and 51 teachers from 26 schools. Students completed measures of emotional reactivity, perceived parental and teacher acceptance-rejection, and depressive symptoms. Cluster-adjusted path models, bootstrap tests of indirect effects, covariate-adjusted sensitivity analyses, and formal multigroup equality constraints were used. In students without SEN, paternal rejection showed a direct association with depressive symptoms (β = 0.15), whereas maternal rejection showed indirect associations through Recovery (standardized β = 0.011) and Impairment (standardized β = 0.022). In the combined SEN group, teacher rejection (β = 0.18) and emotional impairment (β = 0.38) were directly associated with depressive symptoms, and paternal rejection showed indirect statistical associations through emotional reactivity. In an analysis restricted to the 94 students with documented SEN, the teacher-rejection and Impairment associations persisted, whereas the paternal rejection-Recovery estimate was similar but less statistically certain. Formal multigroup tests supported differences only for maternal rejection-Recovery, maternal rejection-Impairment, and teacher rejection-depressive symptoms; other between-group contrasts were descriptive or inconclusive. The findings illustrate how relational and regulatory correlates may vary across heterogeneous learner groups, without establishing causal or temporal mechanisms. The teacher-rejection finding warrants further study in students with documented SEN, while the paternal pathways require particular caution because the Recovery association was less statistically certain in the smaller documented-only analysis.