Life events,social support and depression amongst Taiwanese housewives

Eighty-five community housewives in a Taiwanese city were surveyed. Multiple regression analysis indicated that age, life events and social support were found to relate to depression symptomatology. Younger housewives reported more depression symptoms than their older counterparts. Life events were related to depression, while social support protected women from depression.     

Life events,social support and depression in haemodialysis patients

This study examined the effects of life events and social support on depression in 200 dialysis patients. The instruments used included the Beck Depression Inventory, a modified version of Sarason's Life Experiences Survey and a Social Support Inventory (SSI) constructed by the authors. The SSI consisted of five quantitative measures and three measures of perceived social support. These measures were found to be internally consistent and stable over time. Results showed that clinically depressed dialysis patients reported fewer positive life events and appraised life events more negatively than non‐depressed patients. The total number of life events and the number of negative life events were not found to differentiate between depressed and non‐depressed patients. With regard to social support variables, results showed that depressed patients reported less frequent actual contact and telephone contact with others and perceived a smaller amount and less availability of social support and less satisfaction with perceived social support along the functional dimensions of emotional, informational, appraisal and instrumental support and social companionship. The results were found to provide support for a main effect model of social support and not for a buffering model. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Life events as predictors of mania and depression in bipolar I disorder

To date, few prospective studies of life events and bipolar disorder are available, and even fewer have separately examined the role of life events in depression and mania. The goal of this study was to prospectively examine the role of negative and goal-attainment life events as predictors of the course of bipolar disorder. One hundred twenty-five individuals with bipolar I disorder were interviewed monthly for an average of 27 months. Negative and goal-attainment life events were assessed with the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule. Changes in symptoms were evaluated using the Modified Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and the Bech-Rafaelsen Mania Scale. The clearest results were obtained for goal-attainment life events, which predicted increases in manic symptoms over time. Negative life events predicted increases in depressive symptoms within regression models but were not predictive within multilevel modeling of changes in depressive symptoms. Given different patterns for goal attainment and negative life events, it appears important to consider specific forms of life events in models of bipolar disorder.     

大学生生活事件与抑郁的关系：有调节的中介作用

基于当前抑郁的实证和理论研究现状,对大学生抑郁的形成过程进行探究。采用大学生生活事件量表、流调中心用抑郁量表、自尊量表、多维度多归因因果量表、大五人格神经质分量表,以882名大学生为被试展开调查。结果发现：（1）大学生生活事件、自尊、抑郁、神经质、归因方式等两两显著相关;（2）大学生抑郁的形成过程是多路径的,多层次的,既有生活事件对抑郁的直接作用,又有生活事件对抑郁的间接作用;既有归因方式的简单中间作用,又有归因方式和自尊的链式中介作用,并且神经质在自尊到抑郁的路径中起调节作用。结果表明,大学生生活事件对抑郁的影响是有调节的中介作用,对此进行有针对性的干预可以减少抑郁的发生。     

Life events and brand preference changes

Three types of variable have been used to explain brand preference changes: consumer characteristics, marketing mix factors and situational influences. The study presented in this paper focuses on the relationship between life events experienced by individuals, resultant stress and lifestyle changes and changes in brand preferences. Based on theory and past research, a model is proposed and tested. The data support the notion that brand preference changes may be viewed as the outcome of adjustments to new life conditions and changes in consumption lifestyles that reflect consumer efforts to cope with stressful life changes. Implications for consumer research are also discussed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Life events stress and chronic pain

Stress in life has been found to play a role in triggering, maintaining and exacerbating chronic pain, yet, direct empirical evidence of the mechanism of such a role is limited. In the present study 120 non-selected chronic pain patients and an equal number of matched healthy normals were investigated with regard to life events stress. The investigation revealed that although, patients and controls did not differ in terms of number of events experienced during the last 1 year, however, patients reported significantly higher frequency of occurrence on a distinctive set of events belonging to personal, interpersonal and familial life and events related to change in eating and sleeping habits. Our results emphasize the importance of studying the life events beyond the simple count of number of event occurrence but to explore the specific events those cluster around pain disorders.     

Life events and depression in adolescence: relationship loss as a prospective risk factor for first onset of major depressive disorder

Although stressful life events have consistently been linked to the onset of major depressive disorder (MDD), most research has not distinguished 1st episodes from recurrences. In a large epidemiologic sample of older adolescents (N = 1,470) assessed at 2 time points, the risk conferred by a recent romantic break-up was examined as a predictor of 1st onset versus recurrence of MDD. Results indicated a heightened likelihood of 1st onset of MDD during adolescence if a recent break-up had been reported; in contrast, a recent break-up did not predict recurrence of depression. These results held for both genders and remained significant after controlling for gender. Additional analyses to determine the discriminant validity and specificity of these findings strongly supported the recent break-up as a significant risk factor for a 1st episode of MDD during adolescence. Implications of these findings and subsequent research directions are discussed.     

Anxiety and depression: Past,present, and future events

This article focuses on differences between anxiety and depression. The first study is concerned with the timing (past, present, future) of negative events associated with high levels of anxiety and depression in normal participants. Depression was associated more with past events than future events, whereas the opposite was the case with anxiety. These findings are consistent with those reported in several studies on clinical samples. In a second study, participants provided their emotional reactions to scenarios referring to negative events lying in the past or in the future with the future events being either uncertain or probable. Past events were associated with more depression and less anxiety than future events whether uncertain or probable. Probable future events were associated with more anxiety and depression than uncertain ones. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Critical incidents: Life events for experienced family therapists

Summary The results of this investigation suggest that therapists' professional style and clinical use of self patterns are impacted by critical life events occurring in their personal life. Many subjects reflected on how changes in their family constellations (both family of origin and family of procreation) were important to their professional development. They frequently mentioned that marriage, children, divorce, and illness or death of a loved one impacted their personal and, then, their professional lives. The important life events of becoming a parent or losing a significant loved one was specifically mentioned as strongly influencing changes in one's professional direction and therapeutic style.Becoming a parent caused the interviewees to reevaluate their expectations of their own parents, their client families and themselves. Changes in career aspirations, interactional patterns, and the capacity to be consistent and calm were explored and understood differently. Many subjects described how this transition in their own life shifted their primary focus and altered many of their existing relationships. In particular, female therapists with younger children related how their sense of being female changed. They sought out other women for intimate contact more frequently, they understood their own mothers better, and they frequently were less judgmental of mothers in their client families.Along with creating their own families, death of a parent was keynoted as having a strong impact on the subjects' personal and professional lives. They described questioning (and frequently changing) the amount of time they spent working and the type of work they did. Many began to push for more emotionally intense relationships personally and therapeutically. Detailing how their therapeutic goals for a family now included connection-making rather than just problem solving, they described being much more willing to share their vulnerabilities and personal needs with clients.     

Congruence of personality and life events in depression

Consistent with the personality-event congruence hypothesis, highly sociotropic depressed patients (n = 19) reported more recent negative interpersonal events than negative autonomy events and more negative interpersonal events than did highly autonomous depressed patients (n = 22), for whom the hypothesis was not supported. There was no evidence of such congruence among nondepressed schizophrenic patients (n = 44). In a second study, there was significant personality-event congruence in dysphoric students (n = 26) but not in nondysphoric students (n = 56). Both the high-sociotropy and high-autonomy dysphoric groups separately yielded nonsignificant trends consistent with congruence. These findings add to the growing support for the importance of the sociotropy construct in depression and weaker support for the autonomy construct or its measurement, and they suggest that the congruence effect does not generalize to all psychopathologies.     

Life events and psychological well-being in old age

Abstract

Although life event research has burgeoned in recent years, little attention has been paid to the prevalence of events among the elderly or their relationship to psychological well-being. This paper presents data from a three-wave longitudinal study of community elderly in Aberdeen. Negative life events were highly prevalent among both survivors [N=349) and non-survivors [N=108], but the relatively small differences between the groups indicate that attrition does not seriously affect longitudinal findings. Longitudinal analysis of survivors' data was performed using LISREL and yielded a model with a goodness of fit index of 0.918, demonstrating a close fit between the data and the model. The model parameters indicate that those in poor psychological state were more likely to report serious non-health events than health events, although the latter were more likely than the former to result in a decline in psychological well-being, even after prior psychological state was taken into account. While elderly people with low social integration experienced more severe reactions to life events in the short term than those with high social integration, there were no significant long term effects, even for those reporting highly stressful events. There was no evidence of a sub-group of elderly people lacked into a cycle of serious life events. However life events were not random occurrences; serious health events were more often reported by those with low education while women and those in lower social classes were more likely to report serious non-health events. Overall, long term disruption, directly attributable to life events, was minimal when viewed within the context of the community elderly's stable psychological state.     

Personality,life events and subclinical depression in students

Eighty-eight psychiatrically normal undergraduates, completed four paper-and-pencil measures; a Life Events Questionnaire (LEQ), a questionnaire measuring attributional style (QAS), a Beck Depression Inventory and an Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) measuring extraversion and neuroticism. Neuroticism and introversion were found to be significantly related to subclinical depression. The attributional style hypothesized by learned helplessness theory as a personality trait associated with depression was found to be related to neuroticism but not to depression. The relationship between depression and life events was found to depend upon the way events were interpreted. Depression was related to the frequency of events which students perceived to be unpleasant, uncontrollable and for whose occurrence they felt responsible. Neuroticism and the frequency of negative events for which responsibility was perceived were found to be the best predictors of depression. It is concluded the results support Eysenck's view of personality and vulnerability to depression and doubt is cast on the learned helplessness theory of vulnerability to depression.     

Attributions for negative life events and depression: the role of perceived control

Although perceptions of control occupied a central role in the development of learned helplessness theory, recent helplessness research has not considered controllability judgments when relating attributions to depression. Supporting the importance of this construct, the research discussed in this article found evidence that judgments of control interact with other attributions in predicting depression. Specifically, in a prospective study of stress and well-being in adolescence, internal, stable, and global attributions for negative events attributed to uncontrollable causes were found to be positively related to increases in depression (as predicted by the reformulated helplessness theory), but internal and global attributions for negative events attributed to controllable causes were found to be inversely related to increases in depression. The discussion considers the implications of the findings for understanding the nature of the relation between attributions for naturally occurring life events and depression.     

Life events and functional somatic symptoms: A population study in older adolescents

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of negative life events on functional somatic symptoms (FSSs) in adolescents, based on data from 957 participants of the population cohort TRacking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey. Life events experienced between age 16 and age 19 were assessed with the Kendler's Life Stress interview. FSSs at age 19 and age 16 were measured with the Youth and Adult Self‐Report. The hypotheses were tested by the use of a latent change model. Life events predicted FSSs, even when adjusted for pre‐event levels of FSSs, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and socio‐economic status (B = 0.006, 95% CI [0.003, 0.008], β = .32). Whereas illness‐related life events did not predict FSSs independently (B = −0.003, 95% CI [−0.005, 0.09], β = .05), non‐illness‐related life events did (B = 0.007, 95% CI [0.004, 0.010], β = .31). A past‐year diagnosis of anxiety and/or depression had a significant influence on the association between life events and FSSs (B = 0.37, 95% CI [0.30, 0.46], β = .71), while female sex, exposure to childhood adversities, and family malfunctioning had not. In conclusion, our findings show that FSSs are associated with negative life events in older adolescents. We did not find evidence for stronger effects of illness‐related events.