Within-person variations in self-focused attention and negative affect in depression and anxiety: A diary study

Abstract

This study examined within-person co-occurrence of self-focus, negative affect, and stress in a community sample of adolescents with or without emotional disorders. As part of a larger study, 278 adolescents were interviewed about emotional disorders. Later, they completed diary measures over three days, six times a day, reporting their current thoughts, affect, and levels of stress. Negative affect was independently related to both concurrent stress and self-focus. Importantly, the association between negative affect and self-focus was stronger among participants with a recent unipolar mood disorder, compared to those with an anxiety disorder, comorbid anxiety and depression, or those without an emotional disorder. The implications of these findings to theories of self-focus and its role in emotional disorders are discussed.

Keywords:

• Self-focus
• Negative affect
• Within-person
• Depression
• Anxiety

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grants R01 MH65651 and R01 MH65652, by the Patricia M Nielsen Research Chair of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, and by the William T. Grant foundation.

Notes

¹The original EPQ-R-N scale contains 24 items. We excluded the suicide item to reduce IRB-related concerns related to responding to potentially suicidal participants. We also excluded an item from the analyses about health concerns because in preliminary factor analyses of our results, this item failed to load onto an overall N (Mor et al., 2008).

²Because of the large variability in the time between the initial assessment and the diary assessment, we removed participants who completed the diary part of the study more than four months after the initial assessment and repeated all of the analysis using the remaining participants (n=257). Although the results of these analyses were not identical to those reported here, the direction of the relationships as well as the magnitude of the effects remained very similar. We therefore did not remove these participants from the sample.

³These analyses were repeated with untransformed negative affect scores. Although, as expected, the regression coefficients were not identical to the ones reported here, the direction of the relationships as well as the magnitude of the effects remained very similar.

⁴To examine whether the inclusion of statements that refer to one's emotional or physical state inflates the association between self-focus and affect, we repeated all of the analyses when these statements were eliminated from the data. Because the pattern of results remained the same, we left these statements as part of participants self-focus repertoire.

⁵To examine the possibility that autocorrelation between successive observations may have affected the reported results, we included in the model the time of day as well as time of day squared as level 1 predictors of negative affect. Because the direction of the associations as well as the magnitude of the effects remained very similar, we did not include the time of day variables in the model we report in the manuscript.