Objective
Research has linked adolescent romantic and sexual activities to depressive symptoms. The current study examines whether such activities are uniquely linked to depressive symptoms versus ...symptoms of other disorders (including anxiety, externalizing, and eating disorders), and whether co‐occurring symptoms more precisely account for the association between depressive symptoms and romantic involvement.
Method
Early adolescent girls (N = 83; mean age = 13.45) participated in baseline and 1‐year follow up data collection.
Results
Romantic (i.e., dating and sexual) activities were longitudinally related to numerous types of symptoms. The association between depressive symptoms and romantic variables remained when considering co‐occurring symptoms. Girls with more comorbid disorders reported more romantic activities.
Conclusions
Results suggest that the maladaptive consequences and precipitants of adolescent romantic activities extend beyond depression, but also imply that this association is not secondary to comorbid symptoms. Future work should clarify causal pathways.
Existing research supports competing hypotheses about the link between negative emotional (NE) reactivity to daily events (e.g., hassles and uplifts) and depression. Some have suggested that ...depression is associated with blunted reactivity, and others have suggested that depression is associated with heightened reactivity. In this study, we tested linear and nonlinear associations, cross-sectionally and longitudinally, between NE reactivity and depression among a sample of 232 adolescents. Participants completed lab-based assessments of depression then rated their experience of emotions, daily hassles, and uplifts three times per day for 7 days. Interviews were readministered 1.5 years later. Results show a significant U-shaped relationship between NE reactivity to hassles and depression symptoms cross-sectionally, which suggests that depression is more severe at the extremes of NE reactivity. NE reactivity to daily uplifts showed significant linear associations, but not quadratic associations, with depression such that heightened reactivity to uplifts was associated with more severe depression symptoms concurrently and predicted worsening of depression longitudinally.
Co-rumination (defined as perseverative, negatively-focused discussions about problems) has been linked to internalizing symptoms, especially following psychosocial stress. The sudden outbreak of ...SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during Spring 2020 may have been a common focus of co-rumination. Conceptualized within a contextual behavioral science framework, the current study examined pandemic-focused co-rumination and its components: co-brooding (i.e., passively dwelling on concerns and associated consequences and negative emotions in a dyadic context) and co-reflection (i.e., repetitively discussing problems dyadically to enhance insight). A total of 320 undergraduates (62 %, female, 37 % male, 1 % non-binary gender) completed an online survey from late April-early May 2020 shortly after their universities abruptly ended in-person instruction and removed students from campus. COVID-19-focused co-rumination (specifically co-brooding) was associated with higher levels of internalizing symptoms. Co-brooding and co-reflection each moderated the association between COVID-19 stress exposure and a) internalizing symptoms (COVID-related fears and depressive symptoms) and b) committed action, but in opposite directions, with co-brooding predicting increased symptoms and decreased committed action, and co-reflection predicting the opposite. Results suggest that when the nature of social support-seeking discussions promote psychological flexibility via increased perspective and understanding (vs. dwelling on negative content of experiences), they may ameliorate emotional distress and promote committed action following stress exposure.
•Co-rumination (especially co-brooding) is a form of psychological inflexibility.•Co-brooding about COVID-19 pandemic is linked to internalizing symptoms.•Co-brooding following high COVID-19 stress predicts lower committed action.•Co-reflection after high COVID-19 stress predicts higher committed action.•Psychologically inflexible support seeking may worsen emotional toll of pandemic.
•A latent internalizing dimension explained correlations among manifest internalizing problems.•Internalizing was correlated modestly with anhedonia and robustly with neuroticism.•Anhedonia was ...virtually unassociated with the major depression, net internalizing.
Developmental research documents that anhedonia, or diminished interest in usual activities, is associated with a diverse array of emotional problems in childhood and adolescence. Meanwhile, official nosologies desginate anhedonia as a more specific characteristic of major depressive disorder. Using a quantitative model of the internalizing domain, we compared the strength of transdiagnostic versus diagnosis-specific pathways from anhedonia to major depression (and other internalizing conditions) during adolescence. We recruited 241 youth ages 14–17 who completed semistructured interviews of anxiety and depressive disorders, as well as several self-report surveys of trait anhedonia and neuroticism. Confirmatory factor analysis of diagnostic correlations revealed good fit for a unidimensional model of the 10 internalizing conditions we assessed. This overarching internalizing dimension was statistically significantly correlated with trait anhedonia (r = 0.17) and neuroticism (r = 0.59). In contrast, anhedonia was virtually unrelated to major depression (r = −0.02), net the internalizing dimension. Thus, in this sample, the connection between anhedonia and major depression was explained by a transdiagnostic dimension presumed to underlie all internalizing problems. Compared to neuroticism, however, anhedonia had a more limited association with internalizing, consistent with established personality models of anxiety and depression. We conclude that these data are consistent with conceptualizing anhedonia predominantly as a transdiagnostic correlate of internalizing conditions, rather than a specific marker of major depression, in developmental psychopathology research and clinical interventions for young people.
Numerous studies have supported an association between maternal depression and child psychiatric outcomes, but few have controlled for the confounding effects of both maternal and offspring ...co-morbidity. Thus, it remains unclear whether the correspondence between maternal and offspring depressive and anxiety disorders is better explained by associations between shared features of maternal and offspring internalizing disorders or by specific effects exerted by unique aspects of individual disorders.
Pairs of mothers and offspring overselected for maternal depression (n = 815) were assessed at offspring age 15 years for anxiety and depressive disorders; 705 completed a follow-up at offspring age 20 years. For both mothers and offspring, structural equation modeling was used to distinguish transdiagnostic internalizing pathology--representing the overlap among all depressive and anxiety disorders--from diagnosis-specific forms of pathology. To discriminate between general versus specific pathways of intergenerational transmission of psychopathology, we examined (a) the general association between the maternal and offspring internalizing factors and (b) the correlations between maternal and offspring diagnosis-specific pathology for each disorder.
For mothers and offspring, a unidimensional latent variable model provided the best fit to the correlations among depressive and anxiety disorders. The maternal transdiagnostic internalizing factor strongly predicted the corresponding factor among offspring. In addition, the unique component of post-traumatic stress disorder among offspring was significantly related to the analogous unique component among mothers, but specific components of other maternal disorders, including depression, did not predict corresponding offspring pathology.
Results suggest that intergenerational transmission of internalizing disorders is largely non-specific.
Biased stress appraisals critically relate to the origins and temporal course of many-perhaps most-forms of psychopathology. We hypothesized that aberrant stress appraisals are linked directly to ...latent internalizing and externalizing traits that, in turn, predispose to multiple disorders. A high-risk community sample of 815 adolescents underwent semistructured interviews to assess clinical disorders and naturalistic stressors at ages 15 and 20. Participants and blind rating teams separately evaluated the threat associated with acute stressors occurring in the past year, and an appraisal bias index (i.e., discrepancy between subjective and team-rated threat) was generated. A 2-factor (Internalizing and Externalizing) latent variable model provided an excellent fit to the diagnostic correlations. After adjusting for the covariation between the factors, adolescents' threat overestimation prospectively predicted higher standing on Internalizing, whereas threat underestimation prospectively predicted elevations on Externalizing. Cross-sectional analyses replicated this pattern in early adulthood. Appraisals were not related to the residual portions of any diagnosis in the latent variable model, suggesting that the transdiagnostic dimensions mediated the connections between stress appraisal bias and disorder entities. We discuss implications for enhancing the efficiency of emerging research on the stress response and speculate how these findings, if replicated, might guide refinements to psychological treatments for stress-linked disorders.
General Scientific Summary
Biased perceptions of stressful or emotional events confer vulnerability to a wide array of psychological disorders. We found here that aberrant appraisals of real-world stressors directly predict liability to Internalizing and Externalizing traits, which serve as substrates for diverse mental disorders, but in markedly different ways. Exaggerated perceptions of stressor severity predicted higher standing on the Internalizing trait-predisposing to anxiety and depression-whereas a tendency to downplay stressor impact predicted elevations on externalizing-predisposing to antisocial behavior and substance misuse.
Research suggests the ability to differentiate discrete emotions protects against psychopathology. Little is known about daily processes through which negative and positive emotion differentiation ...(NED, PED) influence depressive symptomatology. We examined NED and PED as moderators of associations between daily processes (negative/positive experiences, brooding, and savoring) and daily depressive symptoms. Hypotheses were tested using intensive longitudinal techniques in two samples oversampled for depression: 157 young adults (Study 1) and 50 veterans recruited from VA primary care (Study 2). In Study 1, low NED predicted stronger associations between daily brooding and depressive symptoms. In Study 2, low NED predicted stronger reactivity to daily negative events. In both studies, low PED strengthened salutary effects of positive experiences and savoring on symptoms. Largely consistent across demographically divergent samples, results suggest both low NED and PED enhance effects of daily events and perseverative self-focus on fluctuations in depressive symptoms.
Previous research demonstrates that carriers of the short allele of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) show both greater susceptibility to depression in response to stressful life events and ...higher rates of generation of stressful events in response to depression. The current study examines relational security (i.e., self-reported beliefs about attachment security) as a moderator of these effects, building on emerging research suggesting that the short allele acts as a marker of sensitivity to the social environment. Participants were 354 Caucasian adolescents oversampled for maternal depression (137 male, 217 female), assessed at ages 15 and 20. Results indicated that the short allele predicted increased stress generation at age 20 among those with low age 15 security but decreased stress generation among those with high security, and revealed a three-way interaction between age 15 depression, age 15 security, and genotype, where depression predicted stress generation only among short allele carriers with low security. Further, among boys only, security interacted with genotype to predict longitudinal changes in depression diagnosis, with the
s
-allele predicting relative increases in probability of depression among boys with low security but decreases among boys with high security. Results support the notion of the short allele as a marker of social reactivity, and suggest that attachment security may buffer against the genetic vulnerability introduced by the short allele, in line with predictions of the differential susceptibility theory.
Two studies examined associations between social networking and depressive symptoms among youth. In Study 1, 384 participants (68% female; mean age = 20.22 years, SD = 2.90) were surveyed. In Study ...2, 334 participants (62% female; M age = 19.44 years, SD = 2.05) were surveyed initially and 3 weeks later. Results indicated that depressive symptoms were associated with quality of social networking interactions, not quantity. There was some evidence that depressive rumination moderated associations, and both depressive rumination and corumination were associated with aspects of social networking usage and quality. Implications for understanding circumstances that increase social networking, as well as resulting negative interactions and negative affect are discussed.
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