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Concurrent and Prospective Associations Between Emotion Reactivity and Depressive Symptoms in Middle Childhood

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Abstract

According to the emotion context-insensitivity hypothesis (ECI: Rottenberg et al. 2005), depression is associated with emotion reactivity such that depressed individuals are less reactive to stressors. Although little is known about the relation between children’s emotion reactivity and the development of depressive symptoms, finding evidence for the ECI before the onset of major depression would suggest that emotion under-reactivity is a risk factor for depression. In this study we address outstanding questions about depression and reactivity by assessing reciprocal associations between emotion reactivity (operationalized as cardiac reactivity to stress) and depressive symptoms in middle childhood, while controlling for rumination. Forty-three children (53 % girls) between the ages of 8 and 12 participated in this longitudinal study spanning a 2-year period. At Wave 1, children completed questionnaires to assess depressive symptoms and rumination. In addition, they completed an emotional stressor task while cardiac reactivity was measured. At Wave 2, children completed a depression questionnaire as well as a performance challenge task while cardiac reactivity was measured. Results showed that cardiac under-reactivity to the emotional stressor at Wave 1 was associated concurrently and prospectively with greater depressive symptom severity. However, Wave 2 depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with Wave 2 reactivity to the performance stressor and Wave 1 depressive symptoms were marginally associated with Wave 2 reactivity. Additional research on emotion reactivity and depressive symptoms in middle childhood is needed; preliminarily, our results suggest that children who exhibit under-reactivity to sadness may benefit from interventions to reduce or prevent the development of clinically-significant depressive symptoms during middle childhood.

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Notes

  1. In this review, stimuli were classified as either positively- or negatively-valenced. Negatively-valenced stimuli included a variety of stressors, such as stress tasks, sad imagery, audio-recorded negative social interactions, and unpleasant pictures. Analyses were not conducted by type of stressor.

  2. Given that there are no “best practices” for assessing emotion reactivity (Nelson et al. 2011), we repeated all analyses using two additional measurement approaches, where change in cardiac reactivity was measured via (1) simple difference scores and (2) percent change scores. Notably, our pattern of findings was consistent across each analytical approach, underscoring the robustness of our findings. For the ease of interpretation, only the set of findings using standardized residualized coefficients (preferred by some methodologists; see Nelson et al. 2011 for further exploration of these issues) are presented here.

  3. Age was not related to depressive symptoms or to rumination at Wave 1. Children’s levels of rumination at Wave 1 were significantly different by gender, with boys reporting higher levels of rumination. Other characteristics are potentially related to physiological functioning, including fitness and anxiety. To account for individual differences in physical fitness, we repeated our analyses controlling for whether children exercised earlier in the day prior to their lab visit, and their height and weight. Controlling for these variables did not alter our findings. As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, given the high level of comorbidity between anxiety and depression, we also conducted a set of analyses controlling for anxiety at Wave 1. Our pattern of findings (not presented here) remained unchanged, although the p-value increased slightly, likely due to reduced degrees of freedom.

  4. Composite variables are treated as continuous variables in all analyses.

  5. Given our small sample size, we did not statistically test whether there were differences in patterns of association between variables among boys as compared to girls.

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Conflict of Interest

Jennifer A. Somers, Jessica L. Borelli, Patricia A. Smiley, Jessica L. West, and Lori M. Hilt declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Experiment Participants

The protocol for this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board prior to the inception of data collection. Assent was obtained from all child participants and their primary caregivers provided informed consent.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pomona College, 647 N College Way, Claremont, CA, 91711, USA

    Jennifer A. Somers, Jessica L. Borelli & Patricia A. Smiley

  2. Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Jessica L. West

  3. Lawrence University, 711 E Boldt Way, Appleton, WI, 54911, USA

    Lori M. Hilt

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  1. Jennifer A. Somers
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  2. Jessica L. Borelli
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Correspondence to Jennifer A. Somers.

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Somers, J.A., Borelli, J.L., Smiley, P.A. et al. Concurrent and Prospective Associations Between Emotion Reactivity and Depressive Symptoms in Middle Childhood. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 37, 692–704 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-015-9491-0

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