Individual differences in the emergence of depressive symptoms in children and adolescents: A longitudinal investigation of parent and child reports.

Abstract

The authors address questions about the rate that depressive symptoms emerge, developmental and gender differences in this rate, and differences between parent and child estimates of this rate. In a 12-wave, cohort-sequential, longitudinal design, 1,570 children (Grades 4-11) and parents completed reports about children's depression. Cross-domain latent growth curve analysis revealed that (a) the rate of symptom growth varied with developmental level. (b) gender differences symptom growth preceded emergence of mean level gender differences, (c) the rate of symptom development varied with age, and (d) parent-child agreement about rate of symptom change was stronger than agreement about time-specific symptoms. The authors suggest that predictability of depressive symptoms varies with age and the dimension under investigation.

Risk and protective factors associated with trajectories of depressed mood from adolescence to early adulthood.

“…Explanations offered for gender discrepancies in adolescent depressive symptoms have pointed to differences in how these symptoms manifest (i.e., as internalizing or externalizing behavior) (Kandel & Davies, 1982), gender-specific coping styles (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001) and reactivity to negative life events (Cyranowski et al, 2000;Hankin et al, 2007), gender differences in puberty-related hormonal changes (Angold & Costello, 2006), or the interaction between gender-linked risk factors and the multiple physical and psychosocial challenges inherent to the adolescent transition (NolenHoeksema, 1994;Nolen-Hoeksema & Girgus, 1994). Other authors have noted that gender differences are already apparent in early adolescence (Angold & Rutter, 1992;Cole et al, 2002;Costello, Mustillo, Erkanli, Keeler, & Angold, 2003;Galambos et al, 2004) and may be moderated by age, with the largest gap between males and females occurring in middle adolescence (Hankin et al, 1998). Thus, it would be important for future research to include participants younger than age 12 in order to capture the period during which gender differences are likely to emerge (Lewinsohn, Hops, Roberts, Seeley, & Andrews, 1993).…”

“…Overall, these studies have described a pattern of increasing depressive symptoms in mid-adolescence (Cole et al, 2002;Garber, Keiley, & Martin, 2002) followed by decline in late adolescence and early adulthood (Ge, Natsuaki, & Conger, 2006;Gutman & Eccles, 2007). Boys' trajectories of depressive symptoms, however, tended to be relatively stable in contrast to girls' symptom trajectories, which exhibited greater increases over time (Cole et al, 2002;Garber et al, 2002;Ge, Lorenz, Conger, Elder, & Simons, 1994). This research has contributed valuable information toward understanding the developmental course of depression through its characterization of average symptom levels with the population over time.…”

Quality of life among adolescents living in residential youth care: do domain-specific self-esteem and psychopathology contribute?

“…Further, we will explore which domains of self-esteem (i.e., scholastic competence, social acceptance, athletic competence, physical appearance, and romantic appeal) contribute with significant unique variance to QoL. In these analyses, we adjust for gender and age because QoL has shown to be gender and age dependent in earlier studies [29], and pronounced gender and age differences have been detected in psychopathology [30,31] and self-esteem [20,32]. Figure 1 depicts the associations to be investigated in our structural equation model.…”

Adequate Screening of Youngsters for Depressive Characteristics

“…Although this was not a goal of the current study, the small interval between different measure moments of this prospective design makes it impossible to investigate the change in symptoms over time. Parent-child agreements of symptom change over time appeared to be considerably better than agreements about the level of children's depression at a specific point in time (Cole, et al, 2002). Future longitudinal research to the predictions in time or the surplus value of parent reports for symptom change reports is recommended.…”