Developmental relations between depressive symptoms, minor hassles, and major events from adolescence through age 30 years

Stress generation and stress exposure models of the relations among depressive symptoms, minor hassles, and major event stress were investigated among 815 community-dwelling participants. Autoregressive latent trajectory models were constructed to examine latent growth patterns from ages 15 years to 30 years and to test 1-year lagged, reciprocal paths between depressive symptoms and stress constructs. Results indicated significant cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between depressive symptoms and both stress constructs at the latent level. At the manifest level, lagged paths from hassles at 1 year to depressive symptoms at the next year were significant between ages 17 years and 24 years. Significant cross-sectional paths between major events and depressive symptoms were found between ages 24 years and 28 years, and modest support was found for lagged paths from depressive symptoms to major events 1 year later. Findings generally suggest a high degree of covariation in depressive symptoms and stress concurrently and over time. One-year lagged predictive effects net of the associations between individuals' latent trajectories appear to be weak, constrained to specific time periods, and most consistent with a stress exposure effect of hassles on depressive symptoms.