Longitudinal associations between emotion regulation and depression in preadolescent girls: Moderation by the caregiving environment.

Abstract

Identifying childhood precursors for depression has been challenging and yet important for understanding the rapid increase in the rate of depression among adolescent girls. This study examined the prospective relations of preadolescent girls' emotion regulation and parenting style with depressive symptoms. Participants were 225 children and their biological mothers recruited from a larger longitudinal community study. Girls' observed positive and negative emotion during a conflict resolution task with mothers, their ability to regulate sadness and anger, and their perception of parental acceptance and psychological control were assessed at age 9. Depressive symptoms were assessed by self-report at ages 9 and 10. The results indicated interactions between child emotion characteristics and parenting in predicting later depression. Specifically, low levels of positive emotion expression predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms in the context of moderate to high parental psychological control. Low levels of sadness regulation were predictive of high levels of depressive symptoms in the context of low to moderate parental acceptance. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that the prospective association between vulnerabilities in emotion regulation and depression are moderated by the caregiving environment. Keywords depression; emotion regulation; emotion expression; parenting; preadolescent girls It has been consistently reported that the rate of depression increases rapidly among girls during adolescence (see review by Keenan & Hipwell, 2005), resulting in a prevalence rate of depressive disorders that is twice as high in adult females compared to adult males (Lewinsohn, Clark, Seeley, & Rhode, 1994;Nolen-Hoeksema, 1994). Children and adolescents who experience depression are likely to encounter severe, recurrent depression later in life (Costello, Angold, & Keeler, 1999;Kovacs, Gatsonis, Paulauskas, & Richards, 1989;Pine, Cohen, Gurley, Brook, & Ma, 1998; see Weissman, Wolk, Wickramaratne, Goldstein, Adams, et al., 1999 for exception). Kovacs and colleagues (Kovacs, Obrosky, & Sherrill, 2003) have shown that childhood onset depression is likely to recur in adolescence in 40% to 60% of clinicallyreferred cases. Early-onset depression also has serious consequences for psychosocial functioning (Lewinsohn, Rohde, Seeley, Klein, & Gotlib, 2003 e.g., Cole, Peeke, Martin, Truglio, & Seroczynski, 1998;Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1992) and predictive of depressive disorders (Keenan, Hipwell, Feng, Babinski, Hinze et al., in press). Thus, identifying preadolescent precursors that predict emerging depressive symptoms in girls is of great importance in understanding the phenomenology of depression in females, as well as for timely prevention and intervention.Dysregulated emotion has been hypothesized to precede the onset of psychological disorders such as depressive disorders (Chaplin, Cole, & Zahn-waxler, 2005;Cole et al., 2003). The importance of studying emotion regulation lies in the f...

Testing the Temporal Relationship Between Maternal and Adolescent Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in a Community Sample

“…These results suggest that there may be specificity of the influence of maternal depression on multiple child outcomes. As previously reviewed, the majority of transactional studies have found associations between maternal depression and child behavior problems(Combs-Ronto, Olson, Lunkenheimer, & Sameroff, 2009; Curran, et al, 1997; Feng, et al, 2009; Sameroff, 2009), yet we failed to find evidence of transactional processes for offspring depression or anxiety. Previous studies have reported inconsistent associations between maternal depression and offspring anxiety.…”

“…The transactional models of parent-child relationships in the development of psychopathology was first proposed by Sameroff and Chandler (1975). Since then, studies testing the reciprocal relationships of the transactional model have focused primarily on the effects of child behavior problems (Sameroff, 2009), such as oppositional defiant disorder on parenting behavior (Curran, Stice, & Chassin, 1997) or parental depression (Feng, et al, 2009; Keenan, Feng, Hipwell, & Klostermann, 2009). These studies, however, have not examined the temporal relationship between maternal and adolescent depression; this is a critical limitation to the extant literature.…”

Neural Activation During Cognitive Emotion Regulation in Previously Depressed Compared to Healthy Children: Evidence of Specific Alterations

“…9 Although ER strategies continue to evolve across the lifespan, strong correlations exist between cognitive-based ER strategies that develop and are practiced in late childhood and behavioral patterns of CER strategy used in later life. 10–17 That is, extant findings indicate that late childhood is a critical developmental period for acquiring adaptive CER strategies to self-regulate affective arousal.…”

Emotion Regulation Mediates the Relationship between ADHD and Depressive Symptoms in Youth

“…In a study examining antecedents of early internalizing problems, Shaw and colleagues (1997) found that difficulties with ER in infancy predicted higher levels of continuous depressive symptoms during preschool. Furthermore, a recent longitudinal study of girls who were between the ages of 5 and 8 at baseline found that difficulties with ER predicted depressive symptoms at age 10 (Feng, Keenan, Hipwell, Henneberger, Rischall, Butch et al, 2009). …”