Appraisals of dependent stressor controllability and severity are associated with depression and anxiety symptoms in youth

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives: Stress is well established as a strong risk factor for internalizing psychopathology. Learned helplessness research demonstrates that perceived controllability of stressors affects internalizing symptoms. Furthermore, subjective perceived stress is associated with psychopathology. However, most recent research has focused on measuring the frequency and expert-rated severity of stressful life events despite evidence for the importance of stress perceptions. The present study brings together past and current literatures to investigate the importance of perceived severity and controllability of recent life events in the association between stressors and internalizing symptoms.

Design and methods: We used a revised version of the Adolescent Life Events Questionnaire (ALEQ) that asked participants (ages 13–22, N = 328) to rate the frequency of 65 stressful events typical to youth, as well as the perceived stressfulness and control they felt over each event. Events were categorized prior to analysis as dependent (self-generated), independent (fateful) or neither.

Results: Controllability and severity appraisals were associated with depression and anxiety symptoms, controlling for stressor frequency (which also predicted symptoms), for dependent but not independent stressors.

Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of controllability and severity appraisals as potential risk factors for internalizing disorders, exposing a potential target for therapy.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress controllability
• stress severity
• depression
• anxiety
• stress appraisal
• ALEQ

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Appraisals of stressor controllability are somewhat related to, but importantly distinct from, the construct of locus of control–general beliefs about whether events, good or bad, are caused by external (e.g., luck, powerful others) or internal (one's own behavior) forces (Rotter, 1966). External locus of control is associated with depression (Benassi, Sweeney, & Dufour, 1988; Cheng, Cheung, Chio, & Chan, 2013; Prociuk, Breen, & Lussier, 1976) but it is unknown how it relates to controllability appraisals of specific stressors. The current study thus focuses on appraisals of the controllability of specific stressors, not general beliefs of one's role in bringing about events.

2 https://osf.io/amjh9/?view_only=6c4d7cff3bd643ecbf4b2453fe435453.

3 In the previous version of the ALEQ, there were fewer independent stressor items and these items were endorsed infrequently (e.g., death of a family member).

4 We originally planned to analyze severity and controllability as raw sums and frequency weighted measures. However, because these measures were highly dependent on the number of stressors endorsed, we found extremely high correlation between controllability, severity, and frequency, preventing separate analyses for these measures. To address this, we instead took the mean controllability and severity ratings across stressors endorsed for each participant, eliminating the dependency on frequency. To understand the importance of frequency in these analyses we both controlled for frequency and tested interactions between frequency and appraisals.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under grants R21 MH102210 and F32 MH09848.