title: Mood-Reactive Self-Esteem and Depression Vulnerability: Person-Specific Symptom Dynamics via Smart Phone Assessment.
abstract: Cognitive theories of depression suggest that mood-reactive self-esteem, a pattern of cognitive reactivity where low self-esteem is temporally dependent on levels of sadness, represents vulnerability for depression. Few studies have directly tested this hypothesis, particularly using intensive data collection methods (i.e., experience sampling) required to capture the temporal dynamics of sadness and self-esteem as they unfold naturally, over time. In this study we used participants' smartphones to collect multiple daily ratings of sadness and self-esteem over three weeks, in the real world. We then applied dynamic factor modeling to explore theoretically driven hypotheses about the temporal dependency of self-esteem on sadness (i.e., mood-reactive self-esteem) and its relationship to indices of depression vulnerability both contemporaneously (e.g., rumination, sad mood persistence) and prospectively (e.g., future symptomatology). In sum, individuals who demonstrated mood-reactive self-esteem reported higher levels of rumination at baseline, more persistent sad mood over three weeks, and increased depression symptoms at the end of three weeks above and beyond a trait-like index of self-esteem. The integration of smartphone assessment and person-specific analytics employed in this study offers an exiting new avenue to advance the study and treatment of depression.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Peter C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Clasen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Aaron J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Fisher
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States of America; Institute for Mental Health Research, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States of America.
authors.forename: Christopher G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Beevers
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D003863:Depression / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016017:Odds Ratio; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012649:Self Concept; D000068997:Smartphone; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013781:Texas / Q000453:epidemiology; D055815:Young Adult