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Understanding the Constellation of Adolescent Emotional Clarity and Cognitive Response Styles when Predicting Depression: A Latent Class Analysis

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Abstract

Adolescence is a period of human development associated with increased emotional intensity and heightened vulnerability to developing psychopathology. This study used Latent Class Analysis to identify subgroups of youth based on emotional clarity and cognitive response styles. Participants were 436 adolescents (51.8% female; 48.2% African-American/Black, 47.4% Caucasian/White) who completed measures of emotional clarity, cognitive response styles, and depression at baseline (M = 13.02 years, SD = .83), and at a 1-year and 4-year follow-up. Four classes were identified and used to predict depression outcomes. Overall, youth with above average emotional clarity who reported using a variety of adaptive cognitive response styles also had the lowest level of depressive symptoms at baseline. Class membership did not predict depressive symptoms at any follow-up. The results suggest that the unique profiles based on youth reported levels of emotional clarity and use of problem solving, distraction, and rumination, may not be more predictive of depression outcomes, beyond earlier assessments of depression or by examining these facets in isolation.

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Notes

  1. To constrain individuals to their most likely class, the logits for the classification probabilities for the most likely latent class membership obtained in the first stage of data analysis were entered as parameters for each class.

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Funding

This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH79369 and MH101168 to Lauren B. Alloy. Brae Anne McArthur was supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Taylor A. Burke was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Research Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Temple University, Weiss Hall, 1701 N. 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Brae Anne McArthur, Liza M. Haas, Taylor A. Burke, Lisa E. Johnson, Thomas M. Olino & Lauren B. Alloy

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Lyn Y. Abramson

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  1. Brae Anne McArthur
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  2. Liza M. Haas
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  3. Taylor A. Burke
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  4. Lisa E. Johnson
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  6. Lyn Y. Abramson
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  7. Lauren B. Alloy
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Correspondence to Brae Anne McArthur.

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Conflict of Interest

Brae Anne McArthur, Liza M. Haas, Taylor A. Burke, Lisa E. Johnson, Thomas M. Olino, Lyn Y. Abramson and Lauren B. Alloy declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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McArthur, B.A., Haas, L.M., Burke, T.A. et al. Understanding the Constellation of Adolescent Emotional Clarity and Cognitive Response Styles when Predicting Depression: A Latent Class Analysis. Cogn Ther Res 42, 803–812 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-018-9930-9

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