Recent research on psychosocial factors in the etiology of depression has generally focused on either the effect of external life events and chronic strains as precipitants of depression, or on cognitive-personality factors that might create vulnerabilities to depression. While the cognitive theorists acknowledge the role of precipitating events, their person-centered focus has led to a relative neglect of environmental influences. The proposed project explicitly investigates the potential interaction of specific cognitive/motivational personality factors with the occurrence of specific types of life events in producing clinical depression.
The specific aims of the project are to investigate the hypotheses that depressed individuals tend to be highly sociotropic or autonomous, i.e., are highly motivated toward either affiliation, avoidance of criticism, and pleasing others, or toward autonomous achievement and freedom from external constraints, and that these factors create specific vulnerabilities to negative events in each of these two areas. Sociotropic and autonomous personality characteristics are also hypothesized to be associated with different types of depressive experience, manifest in somewhat different patterns of symptomatology. The above hypotheses will be tested by comparing depressed and schizophrenic patients, diagnosed according to RDC criteria, and nonpsychiatric community controls on measures of sociotropic and autonomous achievement motivation, occurrence of recent stressful life events, perceptions of those events, and interactions among these variables. Comparisons among the depressed patients on specific clinical features will also be made as a function of sociotropic and autonomous personality dimensions. The generalizability of findings across subtypes of depression, such as endogenous vs. nonendogenous and situational vs. nonsituational will also be investigated. The long-term objectives are to better understand the etiology of unipolar depression, to facilitate improvements in treatment and to provide knowledge useful for preventive interventions.
| Robins, C J; Luten, A G (1991) Sociotropy and autonomy: differential patterns of clinical presentation in unipolar depression. J Abnorm Psychol 100:74-7 |
| Robins, C J; Block, P; Peselow, E D (1990) Endogenous and non-endogenous depressions: relations to life events, dysfunctional attitudes and event perceptions. Br J Clin Psychol 29 ( Pt 2):201-7 |
| Robins, C J (1990) Congruence of personality and life events in depression. J Abnorm Psychol 99:393-7 |
| Robins, C J; Block, P; Peselow, E D (1989) Specificity of symptoms in RDC endogenous depression. J Affect Disord 16:243-8 |
| Robins, C J; Block, P; Peselow, E D (1989) Relations of sociotropic and autonomous personality characteristics to specific symptoms in depressed patients. J Abnorm Psychol 98:86-8 |
