DEPRESSION HISTORY, DEPRESSION VULNERABILITY, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF EVERYDAY NEGATIVE EVENTS

This study examined whether deficits in dealing with daily problems emerge before a depressive episode (i e, pre-existing vulnerability) or after a depressive episode (i e, psychosocial scar) Participants completed a 30-day daily diary in which they reported their most negative event of the day, their appraisals of that event, and their mood Three years later, they completed a structured depression interview The sample consisted of 350 college students, 24 of whom had a past history of depression and 54 of whom experienced a depressive episode subsequent to diary completion Multilevel modeling revelled that students with past depression blamed others more thin the never-depressed and those with subsequent depression, which supported the scar hypothesis In support of the vulnerability hypothesis as compared to the never-depressed group, participants with past depression demonstrated steeper declines in positive mood on more stressful days but did not significantly differ from the subsequent-depression group Over all our findings do not provide clear support for either hypothesis, however, this study is the first to use a daily diary design to directly compare individuals with past depression to individuals who would subsequently experience depression