Trait effects within potential sources of variance in transient depression

An S-R Inventory of Depression was designed to assess the experience of transient states of ‘normal unhappiness’ in non-clinical subjects and was administered to 80 men and 80 women. Differences between individuals in their overall proneness to depression and in their patterns of sensitivity to various provoking situations provided the larger sources of interpretable variance for each sex. The Neuroticism dimension of personality was involved in both sources, in the latter through the potentiation of a person's generalized response to any given situation. The argument depended upon correlations between personality dimensions and the grand means and variance components derived from a separate two-way analysis of variance in the S-R inventory for each person. This is one way to explore the effects of trait-like variables within the form of ‘interactional’ approach embodied in variance component analyses.