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.