Everyday emotion, naturalistic life stress, and the prospective prediction of adolescent depression

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives

Increasing research underscores low positive emotion (PE) as a vital component of depression risk in adolescence. Theory also suggests that PE contributes to adaptive coping. However, it is unclear whether naturalistic experiences of emotions contribute to long-term depression risk, or whether daily PE levels equip adolescents to cope with later naturalistic stressors, reducing risk for depression. The current study examines whether PE (and negative emotion [NE]) assessed via ecological momentary assessment (EMA) (a) predict prospective increases in depression, and (b) moderate the association between later life stressors and depression.

Design

Longitudinal study of community-recruited adolescents, with EMA at baseline.

Method

Adolescents (n = 232) completed contextual threat life stress interviews, interview and self-report measures of depression at baseline and 1.5 year follow-up. At baseline, they completed a seven-day EMA of emotion.

Results

Preregistered analyses showed that daily NE, but not PE, predicted increased depression over time and moderated the association between interpersonal episodic stress and self-reported depression.

Conclusions

Results did not support daily PE as a buffer against depressogenic effects of life stress, but point to daily NE as a marker of depression risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Positive emotion
• negative emotion
• adolescence
• depression
• life stress
• ecological momentary assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 That this finding was supported using self-report but not interview measures is somewhat surprising, as these types of assessments generally converge (e.g., Stuart et al., 2014), but important differences in measures may account for discrepant results. For example, the DASS-21 depression scale (derived empirically to discriminate depression from anxiety) emphasizes anhedonia symptoms (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995b) and provides more continuous variance than our interview rating scale. Nevertheless, the inconsistency raises questions about the robustness of our findings.

Additional information

Funding

We thank Drs. Fanny Mlawer, Y. Irina Li, Zoey Shaw, and Meghan Huang for their contributions to this study, as well as participating families. Funding for this study was provided by the University of Rochester. KKC and GALD were supported by Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation during manuscript preparation.