Research reportCan personality assessment predict future depression? A twelve-month follow-up of 631 subjects☆
Section snippets
Sample
We attempted to study a stratified random sample of 1000 noninstitutionalized adults, 18 years of age or older, who lived in the greater metropolitan area of St. Louis, Missouri in June 1994 and to follow them up twelve months later. The Washington University Human Subjects Committee approved the study methods. Potential participants initially were identified at random from standard telephone lists and asked if they were willing to participate in a questionnaire survey of depression,
Results
The levels of depressive symptoms, as measured by CES-D scores, are summarized for men and for women in Table 1. Women more often had CES-D scores of 21 or more than did men (18% versus 13%), as expected from previous community surveys. There were also strong differences in personality between men and women: women were higher than men in Harm Avoidance, Reward Dependence, and Cooperativeness (Table 2).
The observed gender differences in personality accounted for the observed differences in CES-D
Discussion
Our findings indicate that TCI Harm Avoidance is a marker of emotional vulnerability to depression. In contrast, TCI Self-Directedness is a marker of executive functions that protect a person from depression. As a result, individuals with depression are likely to be both anxiety-prone (i.e., high in Harm Avoidance) and immature (i.e., low in Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness) (see Table 7). In prior work, we showed that depression and these same personality variables were correlated at the
Acknowledgment
We thank Dr. Richard Hudgens for his valuable comments on an earlier draft.
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Supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health MH-60879, MH-62130, AA-840314.