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Introduction
Early childhood adversities and recent negative life events have been shown to be robust predictors of major depression in adolescents and adults (Kessler & Magee, 1993; Kessler et al. 1997; Mazure, 1998; Hammen, 2005; Garber, 2006), but little research has examined how the two sources of stress might be associated in their link to depression. One approach hypothesizes that childhood adversity alters neurobiological and psychosocial processes whereby individuals may be sensitized to the effects of recent stressful events, responding with depression at lower levels of stress (Hammen et al. 2000) or with greater reactivity to the effects of adult severe events (Heim et al. 2000, 2002; Kendler et al. 2004). Another approach suggests that childhood stressors add to lifetime stress burden and independently predict depression along with recent stress (Turner & Lloyd, 1995, 2004). Other studies of the childhood adversity-adult depression link have simply ignored the role of current or recent stressful life events.
In the present article an additional mechanism of the effects of early adversity is hypothesized. Early adversity may be a marker of continuing exposure to negative stressors, such that those with exposure to childhood negative events and circumstances are more likely to continue to be exposed to stressful events and circumstances (Pearlin, 1989), especially adolescents who are still living at home. Several investigators have demonstrated that the number of adversities and life events experienced in childhood and adolescence is associated with the number of life events and chronic stressors experienced even into adulthood (Turner et al. 1995; Turner & Butler, 2003; Turner & Turner, 2005), and Cole et al. (2006) demonstrated considerable continuity in burden and number of life events in middle and elementary school samples. Some of the effects of early adversity on adolescent depression may be due less to their special status as 'early' as to their continuity with later stressors. Thus, the association between early adversity and youth depression may be mediated by recent stressors. Examining the mediational role of recent life stress on depression is consistent with the stress-generation perspective (Kendler et al. 1999; Hammen, 2006), in which vulnerable individuals may experience the occurrence of stressful life events at least in part because of their characteristics, behaviors...