Do Depressive Symptoms Erode Self-esteem in Early Adolescence?

Abstract

We hypothesized that in early—but not mid or late—adolescence, self-esteem is malleable (i.e., rank-order instable) and is particularly susceptible to the effect of depressive symptoms. Results of a latent variable, cross-lagged, structural equation modeling analysis of data from the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; N = 4520) were consistent with the two hypotheses. Findings highlight the need to utilize a developmental framework when examining the effect of depression on self-esteem, and allude to the potentially deleterious effect of depression vis-à-vis self-development during early adolescence.

Keywords:

• Depressive symptoms
• Self-esteem
• Scar hypothesis
• Early adolescence
• Structural equation modeling

This research was based on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (PI) and Peter Bearman, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with cooperative funding participation by: the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders; the National Institute of Drug Abuse; The National Institute of General Medical Sciences; the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute of Nursing Research; the Office of AIDS Research, NIH; the Office of Research on Women's Health, NIH; the Office of Population Affairs, DHHS; the National Center for Health Statistics, Center For Disease Control and Prevention, DHHS; the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, DHHS, and the National Science Foundation. In preparation of this manuscript, Christopher Henrich was supported by a travel grant from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

Notes

1. The term “scarring”, as pertaining to the effect of depression on personality and the self-concept, might be more confusing than clarifying. Scarring implies a long-term effect of depression on personality/self-concept, but such an effect need not be long term in order to be of substantive or clinical importance. To illustrate, in adolescence, depression might lower self-esteem for a period of one week, during which the adolescent—in an attempt to restore self-esteem—might engage in potentially harmful risk behaviors (e.g., unsafe sex). These behaviors might succeed in restoring self-esteem, but at the expense of serious subsequent problems. We therefore deem all effects of depression on personality in general, and on the self-concept in particular, of interest, whether or not long term. To honor, and maintain continuity with, the originators of this hypothesized effect (i.e., Lewinsohn et al., 1981), we labeled this hypothesized effect as “the scar hypothesis”. However, throughout the article we elected to speak of “the effect of depression on the self-concept” instead of scarring. Moreover, this article's title refers to depression eroding, rather than scarring, the self (as in Shahar & Davidson, 2003).

2. In this context, and particularly in reference to Trzensiewski et al. (2003), it is important to distinguish rank-order, inter-individual self-esteem instability, or—as we label it here—variability, as manifested by a small autoregressive effect of self-esteem, from intraindividual self-esteem instability, which pertains to within-individual fluctuations in self-esteem, usually over a short period of times, such as days (e.g., Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1992). In the present article we focus on the former, autoregressive, type of self-esteem instability. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the need to make this distinction.