Intergenerational transmission of depression: Testing a comprehensive set of putative mediators

Offspring of depressed parents at increased risk for developing depression. They also differ from offspring of nondepressed parents on numerous risk factors, including personality, cognitive biases, neural processing of emotional stimuli, subthreshold depression and anxiety and irritability symptoms, and interpersonal functioning (Goodman, 2020; Gotlib et al., 2023). However, few studies have tested whether these risk factors mediate the transmission of depression from parents to offspring. In a longitudinal study of a community sample of youth and parents (n = 481), we examined if these risk factors mediated the relationship between parental and youth depression using structural equation modeling. Separate models revealed significant indirect effects for negative emotionality, cognitive biases, and depressive, anxiety and irritability symptoms. However, when these independent mediators were entered in a model that also included subthreshold depressive symptoms only depression had unique indirect effects. Our findings are contextualized based on our analytic approach and the highly intertwined and overlapping nature of the mediating risk factors assessed with depressive symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).