| Depression is a world-wide mental health problem which affects twice as many females as males in adolescence and adulthood. In order to effectively prevent depression, it is crucial to understand both emotional and cognitive factors related to depression and to understand whether one or both of these types of factors are gender-related. The present study examined internalizing emotional style (expressing sadness, suppressing anger) and pessimistic attributional style (attributing negative events to internal, stable, and global causes and positive events to external, unstable, and specific causes) as possible risk factors. Although it is often hypothesized that showing an internalizing emotional style is related to depression, this is the first study to fully examine this and to investigate its relative importance as compared to attributional style, which research has documented as a correlate of depression.; Self-report and observational measures of emotional and attributional style were used to examine these styles as correlates of depressive symptoms and as potential mediators of the link between gender and depressive symptoms in 100 18- and 19-year old college students. Students were observed while interacting with a friend in a frustrating situation. This methodology allowed for a more complete analysis of emotional style than previous studies that did not use observations of emotion expression.; Findings contributed to the literature by documenting that both internalizing emotional factors (feeling sad, suppressing anger displays) and pessimistic attributional styles were unique predictors of depressive symptoms, and found that emotional style tended to be particularly predictive in the presence of negative life events. Also, as predicted, females showed greater levels of depressive symptoms than males. However, this was not accounted for by emotional or attributional style. Lastly, there was a trend for exaggerated happiness expressions (showing high levels of happiness with a friend, even while generally feeling low levels of happiness) predicted depression. The present study highlights the importance of considering emotions, even anger and happiness, in models of depression. It also supported an additive model of emotional style and attributional style together predicting depressive symptoms, rather than one being primary. |
