The validity of the hopelessness theory of depression for clinical and normal samples of 9-to-12-year-old children

Abstract

The present cross-sectional study examined the validity of the hopelessness theory of depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) for preadolescent children drawn from clinical-outpatient Ns = depressed and 34 nondepressed-clinical) and normal populations (N = 39). These children completed the Depression Self-Rating Scale, the Hopelessness Scale for Children, the Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Children's Hassles Scale, and a modified version of Coddington's Life Events Scale for Children. Exploratory stepwise regression revealed that, among the distal contributory causes of hopelessness depression evaluated (i.e., major negative life events, daily hassles, the interaction between both forms of negative life stress, stable-global attributions for negative outcomes [depressogenic attributional style; the diathesis], and the diathesis - stress interactions), the depressogenic attribution-daily hassles interaction was the sole predictor selected as contributing significantly to the prediction of hopelessness. In a separate stepwise analysis, this same diathesis-stress interaction was selected along with hopelessness, the proximal sufficient cause of hopelessness depression, as contributing significantly to the prediction of self-reported depression. Hierarchical regression revealed that the distal contributory causes accounted for 18.18% of the variance in hopelessness. Moreover, the distal contributory and proximal sufficient causes of hopelessness depression (i.e., full model) accounted for 60.58% of the variance in self-reported depression. Overall, the diathesis-stress component was not supported in the hierarchiacal regression analyses, with the exception of a significant (p<.02) interaction between the depressogenic attributional style and daily hassles in predicting g self-reported depression when the full model was employed. Discriminant analyses using the full model revealed that clinically depressed children could not be significantly distinguished from children with nondepressive diagnosable disorders and, while depressed and normal-control children could be significantly distinguished, only half of the depressed children were correctly classified...