Background and Objectives: Stress is well established as a strong risk factor for internalizing psychopathology. Learned helplessness research demonstrates that perceived controllability of stressors affects internalizing symptoms. Furthermore, subjective perceived stress is associated with psychopathology. However, most recent research has focused on measuring the frequency and expert-rated severity of stressful life events despite evidence for the importance of stress perceptions. The present study brings together past and current literatures to investigate the importance of perceived severity and controllability of recent life events in the association between stressors and internalizing symptoms. Design and Methods: We used a revised version of the Adolescent Life Events Questionnaire (ALEQ) that asked participants (ages 13–22, N = 328) to rate the frequency of 65 stressful events typical to youth, as well as the perceived stressfulness and control they felt over each event. Events were categorized prior to analysis as dependent (self-generated), independent (fateful) or neither. Results: Controllability and severity appraisals were associated with depression and anxiety symptoms, controlling for stressor frequency (which also predicted symptoms), for dependent but not independent stressors. Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of controllability and severity appraisals as potential risk factors for internalizing disorders, exposing a potential target for therapy.

Background: Dependent (self-generated) stress is a strong risk factor for depression and anxiety, but perceptions of stress can alter its impact. Appraisals of dependent stress controllability and severity additionally relate to depression and anxiety over and above stress exposure. Due to the high comorbidity of depression and anxiety, it is unclear whether dependent stress frequency and appraisals relate specifically to depression or anxiety or are transdiagnostically associated shared aspects of internalizing disorders. Consistent with the tripartite model, the current study represented internalizing symptoms with three latent factors -depression-specific, anxietyspecific, and common internalizing -and tested how dependent stress frequency and appraisals of controllability and severity were associated with these factors. Methods:Bifactor modeling was used to create the latent internalizing factors in a treatmentseeking sample of emerging adults (n=356). Structural equation models tested dependent stress frequency and appraisals of controllability and severity as predictors of these latent factors.Results: Dependent stress frequency was associated with common internalizing while perceived controllability was associated uniquely with depression-specific variance. Continuous stress severity was not associated with latent factors, but high-severity stressors were associated with anxiety-specific variance.

Subjective stress severity appraisals have consistently emerged as better predictors of poor health than stressor exposure, but the reason for this is unclear. Subjective stress may better predict poor health for one of at least two reasons. First, because stressor exposure measures consider all stressors as equal, stress severity measureswhich "weight" stressors by self-reported severity-might better predict poor health simply by not treating all stressors as being equally impactful. Second, subjective stress appraisals may index important individual differences in stress vulnerability.We tested these two possibilities in this preregistered, two-study manuscript.Across these two different studies, subjective stress severity was a better predictor of poor health than independently weighted stress severity or stressor exposure. These results demonstrate that, beyond weighting of stressful experiences, subjective stress severity indexes health-relevant individual differences. Moreover, the results suggest that subjective stress severity may be the preferred stress summary metric even when derived from imprecise stress assessment instruments.

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Objective: Depression and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are prevalent and highly comorbid. ADHD symptoms are associated with specific dependent (i.e., self-generated) stressors in children, and there is a strong link between dependent stress and depression. Despite continued comorbidity of ADHD and depressive symptoms into adulthood, it is unknown whether stress generation mediates the relation between ADHD and subsequent depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood, a period of heightened stress. Method: We tested this mediation model in a semester-long longitudinal study of 224 college students (aged 18–23 years). We additionally tested whether this model differed between inattentive versus hyperactive/impulsive ADHD symptoms given evidence that they vary in their relations to stress and depression. Results: Dependent stress mediated the association between total ADHD symptoms at baseline and later depressive symptoms; these effects were equivalent for inattentive versus hyperactive/impulsive ADHD symptoms. Conclusion: These findings suggest stress generation as a mechanism for increased depression in individuals with ADHD symptoms.