Depressive Symptoms, Rumination, and Emotion Reactivity Among Youth: Moderation by Gender

Abstract

The emotion context-insensitivity hypothesis (ECI; Rottenberg et al., 2005) posits that depressive symptoms are associated with blunted emotional reactivity and is supported by the results of a meta-analysis (Bylsma et al., 2008). Yet it remains unclear how strongly ECI holds across emotional response domains, whether ECI operates similarly in male and female individuals, and whether this pattern of underreactivity is observed in youth. In contrast, rumination, a cognitive style strongly associated with depressive symptoms, may be associated with heightened reactivity. We assessed the effects of youth’s depressive symptoms and rumination on subjective and physiological emotion reactivity (N = 160; M_age = 12.67, SD_age = 1.12; 48% female; 94% non-Hispanic). State sadness and respiratory sinus arrhythmia were assessed during a baseline activity (nature video) and a sad mood induction. As hypothesized, depressive symptoms predicted less subjective emotional reactivity, whereas rumination predicted more subjective reactivity. Exploratory analyses revealed that associations for physiological reactivity differed by child gender. ECI may be stronger in terms of subjective rather than physiological emotional reactivity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge Emily Hamm, Vivian Burnette, and Stephanie Vahlsing for their help with data collection and Andrew Jacobson for his help processing cardiac reactivity data. We also express our gratitude to Daniel McNeish for his assistance with data analyses and acknowledge Linda Luecken and David MacKinnon for their helpful input on the data analytic approach.

Notes

¹ As part of the broader study for which the data were collected, children were asked about a number of emotions following a sad mood induction. For the present study, we focused exclusively on changes in sadness, which we believe is most germane to theories of depression and emotion context insensitivity. Exploratory analyses (available from the first author, by request) revealed that our results were specific to the emotional experience of sadness. Note that these analyses add to the literature suggesting a specific vulnerability to aberrations in the experience of sadness among youth with higher depressive symptoms.

Additional information

Funding

The first author is supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.