Unveiling the Structure of Cognitive Vulnerability for Depression: Specificity and Overlap

Igor Marchetti, Tom Loeys, Lauren B Alloy and Ernst H W Koster

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: There is extensive literature establishing the influence of rumination, hopelessness, and dysfunctional attitudes on depressive symptoms. However, it is unclear whether these vulnerability factors are distinctly related to depressive symptoms or show substantial overlap. In two large samples of undergraduates (Study #1, n = 304; Study #2, n = 491) and two samples of clinically depressed individuals (Study #3, n = 141; Study #4, n = 109, from published studies), questionnaire data were used to examine the relationship between cognitive vulnerability factors and depressive symptoms, along with additional measures of anxiety and stress symptoms. To decompose model fit into its specific and common partitions, we relied on commonality analysis (CA). CA showed that there is substantial overlap in cognitive risk factors for depression. Moreover, we found strong evidence that hopelessness provides a unique statistical contribution to depression. This pattern of findings was stable in healthy as well as clinical samples. Symptom-levels analysis revealed that a specific subset of depressive symptoms are associated with hopelessness. In closing, we showed that CA provides a powerful tool to map unique and overlapping variance between multiple risk factors. Moreover, hopelessness emerged to be an important focus of clinical attention.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0168612 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 68612&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0168612

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168612

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().