ABSTRACT
Two studies with college students were conducted to further explore the reliability and construct validity of fear of emotion, as assessed by the Affective Control Scale (ACS), a measure of fear of anxiety, depressed mood, anger, and strong positive emotion. The ACS fared well in tests of internal consistency and of convergent and divergent validity. In an analogue study of panic onset with college students with no history of panic, the predictive and incremental validity of the ACS was demonstrated: the ACS predicted students' fear of induced panic-like bodily sensations even once trait and state anxiety were statistically controlled. A second aspect of the investigation was an analogue test of the hypothesis that stress from interpersonal conflict (induced via remembrance of conflictual interactions with an important person) would moderate the ACS's effects on anxiety and fear of induced bodily sensations. This hypothesis was not confirmed.
Subject(s)
Conflict, Psychological , Emotions , Fear , Interpersonal Relations , Panic Disorder/diagnosis , Adolescent , Adult , Arousal , Female , Humans , Internal-External Control , Male , Panic Disorder/psychology , Personality Inventory/statistics & numerical data , Psychometrics , Students/psychologyABSTRACT
Measures of depression and anxiety correlate highly with one another. It has been hypothesized that this shared variance partly reflects poor discriminant validity, which could be improved by linking item content more closely to diagnostic criteria. We tested this speculation by comparing the Inventory to Diagnose Depression (Zimmerman, Coryell, Corenthal, & Wilson, 1986), developed to correspond with diagnostic criteria for major depression, with the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) in terms of discriminant validity. These measures correlated more strongly with each other than with anxiety but did not differ in their relations with anxiety.
Subject(s)
Depressive Disorder/diagnosis , Personality Inventory/statistics & numerical data , Adolescent , Adult , Anxiety Disorders/diagnosis , Anxiety Disorders/psychology , Depressive Disorder/psychology , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Psychometrics , Reference Values , Reproducibility of ResultsABSTRACT
This study examined attributional style in children of substance abusers. We hypothesized that children of substance abusers are more likely to develop a depressogenic attributional style. Forty children between the ages of 8 and 14 participated in the study. Twenty children were from families with a history of substance abuse and 20 were from families without such a history. Each child completed self-report measures of depression and attributional style. After controlling for depression and other factors, the results revealed that children of substance abusers had a more depressogenic attributional style than did children without such a family history. Implications of the results for children of substance abusers and for hopelessness theory are discussed.
Subject(s)
Child of Impaired Parents/psychology , Internal-External Control , Personality Development , Substance-Related Disorders/psychology , Adolescent , Child , Depression/psychology , Humans , Male , Personality Inventory , Self Concept , Substance-Related Disorders/rehabilitationABSTRACT
The cognitive theories of depression emphasize the role of pessimism about the future in the etiology and maintenance of depression. The present research was designed for two reasons: to provide a clear demonstration that depressed individuals' predictions of the likelihood of future outcomes are more pessimistic than those of nondepressed individuals given identical information with which to make forecasts and identical conditions for forecasting, and to test two additional hypotheses regarding possible mechanisms underlying depressives' relative pessimism in forecasting: a social-comparison and a differential attributional-style hypothesis. We used a modification of the cue-use paradigm developed by Ajzen (1977, Experiment 1) and examined depressed and nondepressed people's predictions of the likelihood of future positive and negative outcomes for themselves and for others. The results provided strong support for pessimism on the part of depressed individuals relative to nondepressed individuals in forecasts for both self and others. In addition, whereas nondepressives exhibited a self-enhancing bias in which they overestimated their probability of success and underestimated their probability of failure relative to that of similar others, depressives did not succumb to either positive or negative social comparison biases in prediction. Finally, in line with the attributional-style hypothesis, depressed-nondepressed differences in subjects' cue-use patterns were obtained, especially in forecasts for self. The findings are discussed with respect to the mechanisms underlying predictive optimism and pessimism and the possible functions and implications of these predictive biases.
