Personality & Mental Health Flashcards
What does Diathesis mean?
Inherent vulnerability to develop an illness
What does stress mean?
Increase risk of developing an illness
Name 3 potential relationships between diathesis and risk levels
- Linear: every increase of diathesis, increases risk
- Exponential: rate of increase of risk gets bigger w each increase of diathesis
- Step-change: increases of diathesis don’t increase risk, but once a critical point is reached, large increase in risk level
Why is identifying personality diathesis hard?
- There could be several diatheses per disorder
- There may be protective factors that buffer effects of diatheses or the stress
- Diatheses may be differentially sensitive to certain types of stressor
What is the SVH (Blatt & Zuroff, 1992)
Specific Vulnerability Hypothesis
- Different things effect different diatheses differently
What are 4 non-personality diatheses of depression?
- Being female
- Having a relative with depression
- Death of a parent in childhood
- Lack of social support
What personality diatheses did Haslam (2007) find for depression?
- High autonomy
- High dependency
- Self-critical personality style
- Pessimistic explanatory style
What is High autonomy characterised by? (Haslam, 2007)
- Self-reliance
- Aversion to being controlled or dependant on others
- Stressors: indicators of personal failure
What is High dependency characterised by? (Haslam, 2007)
- Exaggerated need for others’ guidance and approval
- Fears separation and abandonment
- Stressors: events related to interpersonal conflict, loss, rejection & separation
What is self-critical personality style characterised by? (Haslam, 2007)
- Unreasonably high standards for self
- Prone to punishing and self-evaluation
- Stressors: negative life events they feel responsible for
What is pessimistic explanatory style characterised by? (Haslam, 2007)
- Explain negative events according to things that wont change (stable & global)
- Feel unable to avoid negative events
- Stressors: negative life events that could be attributed to state/global causes
What does SVH suggest about depression
Rates of depression would not be as high for those that experience stressors that are incongruent with their diathesis
What did Abela et al (2012) find when testing depression SVH hypothesis
- Mixed results
- 3 possible causes of inconsistencies
- Little focus on individual stress level relative to group
- Too focused on individual stress level relative to group
- Researcher can’t classify stressful events for each individual
Outline of Abela et al (2012)’s study looking at diathesis stress model
- 140 children aged 6-14
- At least one parent w depression
- Children’s depressive experiences questionnaire, self-esteem questionnaire
- Use children’s depression inventory and children’s hassles scale
- Followed up every 6 weeks over one year
What did Abela at al (2012) analyse for diathesis stress model?
- Ability of dependency and self-criticism to predict depression
- Effect of increased amount of total stress
- Role of self-esteem as a protective factor
