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Personality as a Prospective Vulnerability to Dysphoric Symptoms Among College Students: Proposed Mechanisms

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Abstract

Personality and psychopathology have long been associated; however, the mechanisms that account for this link are not well understood. Stress generation and cognitive vulnerability are examined as potential mechanisms to explain the association between negative emotionality and dysphoria. To evaluate these mechanisms, college students completed measures of personality, dysfunctional attitudes, negative cognitive style, dysphoric symptoms, and negative events. Two years later the same students reported on the occurrence of negative events and levels of dysphoric symptoms that they had experienced over the 2-year follow-up period. Consistent with hypotheses, negative emotionality predicted prospective increases in dysphoric symptoms and the generation of more stressors over time. Both dysfunctional attitudes and negative cognitive style interacted with these additional stressors to predict prospective elevations in dysphoria, and these cognitive vulnerability–stress components partially mediated the association between negative emotionality and future elevations of dysphoric symptoms.

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Notes

  1. Recent research examining neuroticism and stress found that daily stress and neuroticism interacted to predict daily negative affect (Mroczek and Almeida 2004). This finding raises the obvious question that neuroticism may function as a moderator for the cognitive vulnerability X stress interaction in the prediction of future levels of depression. To address this question we examined NEM-Stress Reaction as a moderator of the stress–depression link and the interaction of stress and cognitive vulnerability for each type of cognitive vulnerability. No interactions (i.e. the NEM X stress interaction, nor the NEM X Cognitive Vulnerability X Stress) predicted T2 depression after entering all necessary variables earlier in the regressions. These analyses suggest that NEM-Stress Reaction does not serve as a moderator.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in part, by a NIMH grant R03-MH 066845 and a NSF grant 0554924 to Benjamin L. Hankin.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Zia Lakdawalla

  2. Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Barnwell College, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Benjamin L. Hankin

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  1. Zia Lakdawalla
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  2. Benjamin L. Hankin
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Correspondence to Benjamin L. Hankin.

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Lakdawalla, Z., Hankin, B.L. Personality as a Prospective Vulnerability to Dysphoric Symptoms Among College Students: Proposed Mechanisms. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 30, 121–131 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-007-9053-1

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