Summaries: the best scientific articles for developmental psychology summarized

Dynamics of affective experience and behavior in depressed adolescents

Unipolar depression disorders are an example of emotion regulation disorders. This disregulation is caused by two systems, namely the appetitive system and the aversive system. These systems determine the valence of affective states. Depression is associated with more activity and sensitivity to aversive emotional systems. These cause the appetitive emotional system to become less active and less sensitive. A person will experience more negative affect and reduced positive affect. Three factors that influence this experience are intensity, duration and frequency. Duration is associated with depression, especially when looking at maintaining positive affect and disruptive negative affect.

Depression is also associated with less activity in the left PFC. Targeted behavior is motivated by this area and this causes positive affect. The amygdala is more active in depressed adults and children. Reward related neural structures are less active.

Depressed people experience negative affect more intensely and positive affect less intensely. Depression is also associated with less intense immediate responses to positive and negative stimuli.

Adolescents are undergoing changes in affective competence and contextual challenges. This is why it is important to study development during this period. Literature focuses on disturbances in negative affect, but not on the dysregulation of positive affect. The hypothesis in this study is that depressed adolescents experience dysphoria and anger more frequently, more intensely and for a longer period of time. They will also experience less frequent, less intense and less long-term happiness. Various instruments and behavioral observations have been used to investigate this.

Methods

Participants and Measurements

Participants were 152 adolescents who do not take antidepressants, with ages between 14-18 and their parents. Participants were recruited through a school screening (CES-D) and an in-home diagnostic interview (K-SADS). Families who met the research criteria after the diagnostic interview were invited to participate in a lab assessment. During this assessment, use was made of questionnaires (AIM, PANAS-X, MEI / Child-MEI) and family interaction tasks (LIFE) that evoke happiness, anger or dysphoria.

Results

Experience

Depressed participants experience anger for longer. Depressed women experience dysphoria longer than healthy women. Depressed men experience dysphoria longer than healthy men. Healthy participants experience happiness for longer than depressed participants, according to the MEI, but not according to the observation data.

Frequency

Depressive participants experience anger more often than healthy participants. The difference between depressed and healthy adolescents is greater for women. Depressive participants experience dysphoria more often from healthy participants. Depressive participants experience happiness less often than healthy participants.

Intensity

Depressive participants experience anger more intensively than healthy participants. Depressive participants experience sadness more intensely compared to healthy participants.

Discussion

Various abnormalities were found in terms of duration, frequency and intensity of affect. Depressed participants experience anger longer. Depressed women experience dysphoria longer than healthy women. Data about happiness varies with different methods. These results are consistent with earlier work, because it is shown that depressed adolescents have difficulty retaining positive affect. Data about intensity is less solid, because observations are unreliable. Depressed women mainly experience more anger. In general, depressed adolescents experience more negative and sad affect. Experiencing less positive affect is not supported by the data found. The lack of observation data may reflect task limitations or self-report data may differ in how people remember and summarize their experiences, rather than the actual affective experience. This can cause the difference in data from observations and self-report measurements. In the future, studying the interpersonal context is also important because the family environment of depressed adolescents differs from the environment of healthy adolescents.

A limitation in this study is that relapse and recovery are not included. Affective disregulation has been studied, but this is a very broad term. The generalizability of this study is questionable because there is a lack of diversity in terms of race and ethnicity. Finally, the relationship between adolescents' responses and affective experience can be studied.

What is this article about?

This article addresses the question of how children form their self-concept over time and emphasizes the lack of understanding regarding the origins of individual differences in self-concept. The historical study of self-concept has been divided between social psychology, which examines the influence of social contexts, and developmental psychology, which studies changes over time. The authors advocate for a social-developmental approach, which bridges these fields to uncover the processes through which social relationships shape children's self-views. 

A scientific definition of the concept of the self is difficult due to the varied interpretations. This article focuses on children's self-concept, the representations and evaluations of themselves. The self-concept is defined as a dynamic cognitive construction, operating like a theory that individuals construct about themselves, guiding their behaviour. It exists at different levels of abstraction, from concrete behaviours to general traits and overall worth. Contrary to the assumption that young children cannot abstractly evaluate themselves, research indicates that even 4-year-olds can form nuanced, context-sensitive abstractions of their self-concept.

What is a social-developmental approach to the self-concept?

Despite its importance, empirical research on the origins of children's self-concept has been limited, possibly due to the insularity of social and developmental psychology. Social psychologists focus on controlled experiments with adults, while developmental psychologists study children's self-concept changes over time in real-world settings. Therefore, the authors propose a social-developmental approach to bridge these fields, combining social psychology's focus on specific social contexts with developmental psychology's emphasis on long-term development. This fusion incorporates social psychology's utilization of controlled laboratory experiments to identify causal processes and developmental psychology's application of longitudinal field studies to reveal the emergence and progression of these processes in real-world settings over time. Through this approach comprehensive understanding of how social relationships shape children's self-views throughout development can be gained. 

How do social relationships shape self-concept?

What is the role of self-esteem?

Self-esteem is defined as a global evaluation of oneself as a person and its development is impacted by parental praise. While parents often aim to boost self-esteem through inflated praise, research suggests that this approach may have unintended consequences, potentially leading to a downward spiral in self-esteem. Research suggests that warm bonds and support from parents, rather than direct praise, may be more effective in fostering self-esteem in children. Additionally, supportive relationships contributing to a clearer and more confident understanding of oneself in adolescence, also known as self-concept clarity.

What is the role of self-compassion?

Self-compassion is defined as an orientation to care for oneself as a person and is influenced by early attachment relationships. Self-compassion contrasts two responses to challenges: (1) a kind, nonjudgmental attitude and (2) a harsh, critical one. The study by Peter and Gazelle (2017) is the first longitudinal research on the origins of self-compassion in youth. Drawing from attachment theory, the study suggests that children with secure attachments, marked by consistent care from parents, tend to develop higher self-compassion. Specifically, among children with anxious solitude, those with secure attachments show sustained self-compassion. Children with secure attachments to both parents exhibit even higher levels of self-compassion, indicating the impact of parental care on this trait.

What is the role of mindsets?

Children with growth mindsets believe that abilities can develop through effort and children with fixed mindsets believe that abilities are unchangeable. Previous research suggests that parents influence their children's mindsets through praise and responses to success and failure. Parents who emphasize a child's effort in praise tend to foster a growth mindset, while those focusing on innate abilities may contribute to a fixed mindset. Moreover, parents' beliefs about failure impact their responses, with some viewing failure as enhancing learning and growth and others as debilitating. Encouraging children to see success and failure as part of a continuous learning process can help foster a growth mindset.

What is the role of self-perceived ability?

Self-perceived ability is defined as the understanding of a child's own abilities by evaluating the social comparison of their abilities to the abilities of others. Despite their capacity for social comparison, young children maintain unrealistically positive self-evaluations when outperformed. This may stem from their limited understanding of peers' skills. While older children show more realistic evaluations, their overwhelmingly positive self-perceptions may align with societal norms that encourage favourable self-evaluations. Exposing children to such norms increases favourable self-evaluations, indicating a potential tendency to conceal unfavourable self-perceptions to meet social expectations.

What should future research focus on?

There is growing research on children's self-concept at the intersection of social and developmental psychology and there is a shift towards more experimental and longitudinal studies to understand the precise social processes influencing self-concept development. The authors suggest three priorities for future research:

1. Understanding how children interpret their social experiences,
2. Expanding methodological approaches, and
3. Examining the origins of self-concept across cultures to address the limited focus on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations.

Additionally, future research should be of a cross-cultural nature, aiming to establish generalizability and to shed light on cultural variations in psychological processes, the intricate interplay between cultural beliefs and parenting practices, which influence children's self-perception.

Introduction

Rumination is the term for a pattern of repetitive, self-focused thoughts in response to an emotional state. Rumination has a big effect on someone's well-being. The more someone engages in rumination, the more likely it is that he or she will experience sadness, anger and have a poor sleep quality. Rumination is also linked to psychopathology. For example, people who ruminate often are more likely to develop major depression later in life, experience more anxiety symptoms and have more problems with alcohol abuse. 

Rumination is correlated to different forms of psychopathology. However, most studies have focused on depressive rumination. There is less known about other forms of rumination, such as anger rumination. There have been a few studies conducted and those show that as well anger as depression rumination are related to psychopathology. Ciesla, Dickson, Anderson and Neal found that anger rumination is linked to higher alcohol consumption in a week, but depressive rumination is not. Another study conducted by Baer and Sauer found that borderline personality disorder is linked more to anger rumination than to depressive rumination. 

Two other studies found that only anger rumination was associated with anger, overt aggression and relational aggression. Depressive rumination was linked to depressive symptoms and had a negative association with overt aggression. So, these studies suggest that different kinds of rumination (depressive or anger) may be differentially linked with psychopathology. However, the studies that have been conducted have only focused on individual outcomes or discrete disorders (depression) instead on looking at the transdiagnostic relations between the different subtypes of rumination. A transdiagnostic approach means that common features are examined (so, shared genes or temperament) which divide general psychopathology from normality and contribute to internalizing psychopathology (major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder) and externalizing psychopathology (antiosocial personality disorder, substance use disorder). 

Because the correlations within internalizing and externalizing psychopathology are higher than the correlations between them, this shows that there is indeed a distinction between these kinds of psychopathology. By examining broad-band specific features (features that differentiate between internalizing and externalizing psychopathology), this can help to understand why some individuals are at a higher risk for internalizing disorders than externalizing disorders and vice versa.

The current study

In this study, it is predicted that anger and depressive rumination are best described by two correlated factors, instead of being just one factor (so, it are two separate things). The researchers then looked at whether focusing on the process versus on the content has implications for understanding internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. 

Based on previous transdiagnostic research on depressive rumination, the authors of the article hypothesized that depressive and anger rumination would be associated with both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.  They also thought that the degree to which an individual ruminates, was associated with more psychopathology. In addition, they expected that the emotional focus of the rumination (sadness versus anger) would be differentially associated with psychopathology. They also expected that depressive rumination would lead to internalizing psychopathology and that anger rumination would lead to externalizing psychopathology such as aggression and hostility. 

During their analyses, they allowed for gender differences in the relationship between depressive rumination, anger rumination and psychopathology. This was done because in previous research, higher levels of depressive rumination had been found in woman compared to in men. However, the literature suggests that there would be no gender differences in anger rumination. There have also been gender differences reported in psychopathology: internalizing disorders are more prevalent in women and externalizing disorders are more prevalent in men. Other studies have shown that gender moderates the relation between rumination and alcohol problems: rumination predicts alcohol problems later in life, only in women! Based on these findings, the authors of this article have decided to include gender as a potential moderator.

Method

Participants

The participants in this study were 764 young adults, from 382 same-sex twin pairs. These twin pairs participated in the Colorado Longitudinal Twin Study (LTS).

Measures

Depressive rumination

The participants in the study completed two measures of depressive rumination: the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ) and the 10-item revised version of the Ruminative Response Scale (RRS). The RRS is a 24-item scale which measures rumination (RRQ-Ru) and reflection (RRQ-Re) on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The RRQ-Ru measures negative self-focused thoughts and the RRQ-Re measures self-reflection.

Anger rumination

The Anger Rumination Scale (ARS) is a 19-item scale which is designed to measure the cognitions (thoughts) that emerge during and after an anger episode. The items in the ARS are rated on a scale from 1 (almost never) to 4 (almost always). These items are also divided into four subscales: angry afterthoughts ("I re-enact the anger episode in my mind after it has happened), thoughts of revenge ("I have long living fantasies of revenge after the conflict is over"), angry memories ("I think about certain events from a long time ago) and understanding causes ("I think about the reasons people treat me badly"). 

Psychopathology

Participants completed the major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) from the Diagnostic Interview Schedule-IV. This interview was designed to diagnose the major psychiatric disorders which are in the DSM-IV.

Relations of rumination with psychopathology

Are depressive and anger rumination both associated with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology?

Yes. All the correlations between rumination and psychopathology were significant, which means that both forms of rumination are associated with more psychopathology.

Are depressive and anger rumination differentially associated with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology?

Yes. The correlation between depressive rumination was higher with internalizing psychopathology than with externalizing psychopathology.  Aggressive rumination is associated equally with both forms of psychopathology.

Are internalizing or externalizing psychopathology equally associated with anger and depressive rumination?

Yes. Anger rumination and depressive rumination were associated equally with externalizing psychopathology in both men and women.

Discussion

So, the results of this study suggest that both anger and depressive rumination are associated with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Depressive rumination is more strongly associated with internalizing psychopathology compared to anger rumination. 

Anger and depressive rumination are two common characteristics of psychopathology, but it is still important to look at their independent associations with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. The results of this study also support a two-factor model of anger and depressive rumination. Addressing both the process and emotional content of rumination is important in clinical practice and research. And, because ruminative thought processes are a common feature of psychopathology, this should be a key target in clinical treatments.