Negative cognitive styles are an important cognitive vulnerability for depression, but stability of high cognitive risk, once developed, is unclear. The current study examined stability of cognitive vulnerability to depression in individuals at high and low cognitive risk (extreme scores on both the CSQ and DAS) over a 7-year period from late adolescence through early adulthood. Cognitive vulnerability showed high relative stability, as evidenced by the moderate to high correlation (r s = . 62) between cognitive risk status at study onset and at final assessment 7 years later. Consistent with stability, subgroups were identified using growth mixture modeling, and most cognitively high-risk (62.22% for CSQ, 68.89% for DAS) and low-risk (55.05% for CSQ, 57.96% for DAS) participants showed stable trajectories of cognitive vulnerability. Despite this overall pattern of stability, small mean group changes were found, and a minority of participants showed changing trajectories, consistent with regression toward the mean. Predictors of change and implications for risk for depression in high-and low-risk individuals are discussed.
Keywords cognitive vulnerability; depression; trajectory; stabilityOnce an individual develops vulnerability to depression, can it change without intervention? According to cognitive theories of depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989;Beck, 1967), some individuals have a characteristic way of negatively interpreting life events that provides risk for depression, and this vulnerability appears to coalesce and become fully operational during adolescence (Gibb & Alloy, 2006;Hankin & Abramson, 2001;Hyde, Mezulis, & Abramson, 2008). The current study examines stability of cognitive vulnerability to depression in individuals at high and low cognitive risk during the transition from late adolescence, when this vulnerability already has developed, to early adulthood, a critical developmental period (Arnett, 2000).
Cognitive Theories of DepressionHopelessness theory (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) and Beck's (1967) theory of depression are both vulnerability-stress models in which a cognitive pattern serves as a vulnerability that interacts with negative events to predict depression. In hopelessness theory, the cognitive vulnerability is a negative cognitive style, or the tendency to make inferences that negative life events have stable and global causes, have significant negative consequences for the future, and are indicative of negative self-characteristics. This negative cognitive style interacts with the experience of negative life events to predict hopelessness, the proximal cause of depression in hopelessness theory.
NIH Public Access
Author ManuscriptCognit Ther Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 March 8. In Beck's theory of depression, the cognitive vulnerability is a negative self-schema containing dysfunctional attitudes involving themes of loss, failure, worthlessness, and inadequacy. When this self-schema is activated by negative life events, it leads to specif...