Childhood emotional abuse and adolescent anxiety: a moderated mediation model of bullying victimization, perceived teacher legitimacy, and negative legal emotion

Background: Childhood emotional abuse (CEA) is a robust risk factor for adolescent anxiety, yet the psychosocial mechanisms linking early emotional maltreatment to later internalizing problems remain insufficiently understood. This study examined whether bullying victimization mediates the association between CEA and anxiety, and whether perceived teacher legitimacy and negative legal emotion jointly moderate this pathway. Methods: A sample of 952 middle school students in mainland China completed measures of CEA, bullying victimization, anxiety, perceived teacher legitimacy, and negative legal emotion. Spearman correlations and moderated mediation analyses were conducted using PROCESS Model 60 with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, controlling for gender, grade, and parental education. Results: CEA was positively associated with bullying victimization and anxiety. Bullying victimization partially mediated the relationship between CEA and anxiety. Negative legal emotion significantly strengthened the path from CEA to bullying victimization, indicating amplified risk among adolescents who held distrustful or cynical views toward legal authority. Perceived teacher legitimacy moderated the association between bullying victimization and anxiety, such that higher levels of perceived legitimacy intensified the psychological impact of victimization, particularly among students with elevated negative legal emotion. Conditional indirect effects varied across moderator levels, highlighting a dual-stage, context-dependent risk process. Conclusions: The findings support a dual-moderated mediation model in which individual legal-emotional orientations and school-based authority perceptions jointly shape the developmental cascade from childhood emotional abuse to adolescent anxiety. Interventions should integrate trauma-informed bullying prevention, efforts to enhance procedural justice and perceived teacher legitimacy, and targeted programs to reduce negative legal emotion and rebuild institutional trust.