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Contents
- Abstract
- The Present Study
- Method
- Sample Selection and Characteristics
- Measures
- Avoidance-coping strategies
- Life stressors
- Depressive symptoms
- Results
- Formulation of the LISREL Model
- Preliminary Analyses
- Avoidance coping and life stressors
- Avoidance coping and depressive symptoms
- Integrative Structural Equation Model
- Mediational model
- Alternative full model
- Controlling baseline stressors
- Two-group model
- Discussion
Figures and Tables
Abstract
This study examined (a) the role of avoidance coping in prospectively generating both chronic and acute life stressors and (b) the stress-generating role of avoidance coping as a prospective link to future depressive symptoms. Participants were 1,211 late-middle-aged individuals (500 women and 711 men) assessed 3 times over a 10-year period. As predicted, baseline avoidance coping was prospectively associated with both more chronic and more acute life stressors 4 years later. Furthermore, as predicted, these intervening life stressors linked baseline avoidance coping and depressive symptoms 10 years later, controlling for the influence of initial depressive symptoms. These findings broaden knowledge about the stress-generation process and elucidate a key mechanism through which avoidance coping is linked to depressive symptoms.
Two cardinal assumptions guided early stress research: The stress process is initiated by life stressors, and these stressors cause psychological and physical distress. Contemporary research has provided a more refined understanding of the stress process and a revision of both of these assumptions. Research on stress generation has revealed that the stressor-illness relationship can operate in both directions, with emotional distress producing new stressors (for a review, see Hammen, 1999). Moreover, an extensive body of research has identified the central role of coping strategies in individuals' differential vulnerability to life stressors (for a review, see Holahan, Moos, & Bonin, 1999). Surprisingly, these ideas about the role of stress generation and coping strategies in the stress process have evolved independently. The purpose of this study was to integrate the stress-generation and coping perspectives to test a prospective model of depressive symptoms over a 10-year period.
In an important revision of traditional stress models, Hammen (1991) proposed that depressed individuals, through their depression and related behaviors, generate life stressors, which, in turn, increase subsequent depressive symptomatology. Hammen found that unipolar depressed women generated more interpersonal life stressors across a 1-year period than...