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Links among attachment-related cognitions and adolescent depressive symptoms

Stephen R Shirk1, Gretchen R Gudmundsen, Rebecca A Burwell

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Denver, CO 80208, USA. sshirk@nova.psy.du.edu

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology : the Official Journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53
|January 29, 2005
PubMed

We assessed the role of self-evaluative and support-seeking processes as mediators of the relation between maternal representations and depressive symptoms in a sample of 168 young adolescents. Representations of mother as unavailable, unresponsive, and unsupportive were associated with depressive symptoms measured by semistructured interview and self-report. Moderation tests revealed that the association between maternal representations and depressive symptoms varied as a function of stress level for self-reported symptoms only. Subsequent mediation analyses for higher and lower stress groups showed that support seeking functioned as a mediator in the higher, but not lower, stress group. When depressive symptoms were assessed via interview, results with the full sample indicated that self-worth contingencies mediated the association between maternal representations and symptoms. Findings are discussed in terms of the identification of proximal targets for intervention.

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