Adolescent Girls' Interpersonal Vulnerability to Depressive Symptoms: A Longitudinal Examination of Reassurance-Seeking and Peer Relationships.

Abstract

A transactional, interpersonal framework involving adolescents' reassurance-seeking and peer experiences may be useful for understanding the emergence of gender differences in depression prevalence during the adolescent transition. Sociometric nominations of peer acceptance/rejection and ratings of friendship quality provided by adolescents and their friends were used to measure peer experiences among 6th-8th-grade adolescents (N=520) over 3 annual time points. After controlling for age and pubertal development, significant but small prospective effects offered mixed support for hypotheses: (a) depressive symptoms and negative peer relations predicted increasing levels of girls' reassurance-seeking; (b) initial levels of reassurance-seeking and depressive symptoms predicted deteriorating friendship quality among girls and low friendship stability, respectively; and (c) reassurance-seeking combined with poor peer experiences predicted increases in girls' depressive symptoms.

The specificity of maternal parenting behavior and child adjustment difficulties: A study of inner-city African American families.

“…Consistent with transactional systems theories that characterize the bidirectional nature of the interactions between children and their environments, the most likely explanation for this finding is that children's depressive symptoms lead mothers to ramp up their warm and supportive parenting behavior (Bronfenbrenner, 1977;Cummings et al, 2000;Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). Building on interpersonal theories of depression, depressed children may be more likely to doubt the sincerity of increases in maternal warmth and support (i.e., "reassurance"), which in turn may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, their depressive symptoms (e.g., Joiner, 1999;Joiner, Metalsky, Gencoz, & Gencoz, 2001;Prinstein, Borelli, & Cheah, 2005).…”

Developmental Trajectories of Perceived Friendship Intimacy, Constructive Problem Solving, and Depression from Early to Late Adolescence

“…Specifically, having withdrawn friends (Guroglu et al 2007), victimization by peers (Hodges et al 1997), and low friendship quality (Prinstein et al 2005a) have been associated with higher levels of internalizing problems. The present study confirms that the development of friendship quality and the development of depression are specifically associated for adolescent girls.…”

“…Further, girls' emotional states may be more affected by the quality of their friendship than boys' emotional states are (Prinstein et al 2005a;Rudolph 2002;Rudolph and Hammen 1999). For example, adolescent girls were found to report more depressive symptoms after experiencing interpersonal stress than boys (Rudolph 2002) and are suggested to be more sensitive to changes in friendship quality compared to boys (Rose et al 2007).…”

“…Furthermore, high commitment and high balanced relatedness can be viewed as two indicators for high friendship quality, and cross-sectional (Kiesner et al 2003) and over-time (Prinstein et al 2005a;Stice et al 2004) associations between low perceived friendship quality and depression in adolescence have been shown. Nevertheless, differences between friendship types in developmental trajectories of depression remain unclear.…”

“…Therefore, differences in depression between friendship types may be more pronounced for girls than for boys. Finally, adolescents with stable friendships have been found to have less depression than adolescents with low stable friendships (Prinstein et al 2005a). We will therefore control for differences in depression between stable versus non-stable friendships when examining differences between friendship types in depression.…”