Social support and cognitive reappraisal in adolescent females: The moderating role of lifetime stressor exposure.

Although social support is known to shape how individuals use emotion regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, little is known about the specific dimensions of social support that facilitate such use and whether this use is moderated by lifetime stressor exposure. To investigate, we harnessed data from 47 adolescent females who participated in the Psychobiology of Stress and Adolescent Depression (PSY SAD) study to examine how six dimensions of social support related to youths' use of cognitive reappraisal. In addition, we investigated whether lifetime stressor exposure moderated the association between social support and cognitive reappraisal use in this sample.

Intergenerational transmission of lifetime stressor exposure in adolescent girls at differential maternal risk for depression.

Objective: Adolescent girls who grow up with mothers who are depressed are themselves highly vulnerable to developing depression (i.e., "intergenerational transmission of depression").

Neural and peripheral markers of reward during positive social evaluation are associated with less clinician-rated depression symptom severity in adolescence.

Although blunted sensitivity to reward is thought to play a key role in promoting risk for depression, most research on this topic has utilized monetary reward paradigms and focused on currently depressed adults. To address this issue, we analyzed neural reward and β-endorphin data from the Psychobiology of Stress and Adolescent Depression (PSY SAD) Study, which recruited a well-characterized sample of adolescent girls at high vs. low risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) ( = 52,  = 14.

Psychobiology of Stress and Adolescent Depression (PSY SAD) Study: Protocol overview for an fMRI-based multi-method investigation.

Depression is a common, often recurrent disorder that causes substantial disease burden worldwide, and this is especially true for women following the pubertal transition. According to the Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression, stressors involving social stress and rejection, which frequently precipitate major depressive episodes, induce depressive symptoms in vulnerable individuals in part by altering the activity and connectivity of stress-related neural pathways, and by upregulating components of the immune system involved in inflammation. To test this theory, we recruited adolescent females at high and low risk for depression and assessed their psychological, neural, inflammatory, and genomic responses to a brief (10 minute) social stress task, in addition to trait psychological and microbial factors affecting these responses.