The vicious cycle of psychopathology and stressful life events: A meta-analytic review testing the stress generation model.

Stress generation theory initially posited that depression elevates risk for some stressful events (i.e., dependent events) but not others (i.e., independent events). This preregistered meta-analytic review examined whether stress generation occurs transdiagnostically by examining 95 longitudinal studies with 38,228 participants (537 total effect sizes) from over 30 years of research. Our multilevel meta-analyses found evidence of stress generation across a broad range of psychopathology, as evidenced by significantly larger prospective effects for dependent (overall psychopathology: r = .23) than independent (overall psychopathology: r = .10) stress. We also identified unique patterns of effects across specific types of psychopathology. For example, effects were larger for depression than anxiety. Furthermore, effects were sometimes larger in studies with younger participants, shorter time lags between assessments, checklist measures of stress, and for interpersonal stressors. Finally, a multilevel meta-analytic structural equation model suggested that dependent stress exacerbates psychopathology symptoms over time (ß = .04), possibly contributing to chronicity. Interventions targeting the prevention of stress generation may mitigate chronic psychopathology. Conclusions of this study are limited by the predominance of depression effect sizes in the literature and our review of only English language articles. On the other hand, the findings are strengthened by rigorous inclusion criteria, lack of publication bias, and absence of moderating effects by publication year. The latter underscores the replicability of the stress generation effect over the last 30 years. Taken together, the review provides robust evidence that stress generation is a cross-diagnostic phenomenon that contributes to a vicious cycle of increasing stress and psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Risk and protective factors for stress generation: A meta-analytic review.

The stress generation hypothesis suggests that some individuals contribute more than others to the occurrence of dependent (self-generated), but not independent (fateful), stressful life events. This phenomenon is commonly studied in relation to psychiatric disorders, but effects are also driven by underlying psychological processes that extend beyond the boundaries of DSM-defined entities. This meta-analytic review of modifiable risk and protective factors for stress generation synthesizes findings from 70 studies with 39,693 participants (483 total effect sizes) from over 30 years of research. Findings revealed a range of risk factors that prospectively predict dependent stress with small-to-moderate meta-analytic effects (rs = 0.10-0.26). Negligible to small effects were found for independent stress (rs = 0.03-0.12), and, in a critical test for stress generation, most effects were significantly stronger for dependent compared to independent stress (ßs = 0.04-0.15). Moderation analyses suggest effects of maladaptive interpersonal emotion regulation behaviors and repetitive negative thinking are stronger for interpersonal (versus non-interpersonal) stress; effects of repetitive negative thinking and excessive standards for self may be inflated by overreliance on self-report measures that fail to isolate psychological distress from objective experience. Findings have key implications for advancing stress generation theory and informing targets for intervention.

Diversion of Attention Leads to Conflict between Concurrently Attended Stimuli, Not Delayed Orienting to the Object of Interest.

The control processes that guide attention to a visual-search target can result in the selection of an irrelevant object with similar features (a distractor). Once attention is captured by such a distractor, search for a subsequent target is momentarily impaired if the two stimuli appear at different locations. The textbook explanation for this impairment is based on the notion of an indivisible focus of attention that moves to the distractor, illuminates a nontarget that subsequently appears at that location, and then moves to the target once the nontarget is rejected. Here, we show that such delayed orienting to the target does not underlie the behavioral cost of distraction. Observers identified a color-defined target appearing within the second of two stimulus arrays. The first array contained irrelevant items, including one that shared the target's color. ERPs were examined to test two predictions stemming from the textbook serial-orienting hypothesis. Namely, when the target and distractor appear at different locations, (1) the target should elicit delayed selection activity relative to same-location trials, and (2) the nontarget search item appearing at the distractor location should elicit selection activity that precedes selection activity tied to the target. Here, the posterior contralateral N2 component was used to track selection of each of these search-array items and the previous distractor. The results supported neither prediction above, thereby disconfirming the serial-orienting hypothesis. Overall, the results show that the behavioral costs of distraction are caused by perceptual and postperceptual competition between concurrently attended target and nontarget stimuli.

Meta-analysis: Exposure to Early Life Stress and Risk for Depression in Childhood and Adolescence.

OBJECTIVE: Early life stress (ELS) is associated with increased risk for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD) in adulthood; however, the degree to which ELS is associated with an early onset of MDD (ie, during childhood or adolescence) is not known. In this meta-analysis, we estimated the associations between ELS and the risk for onset of MDD before age 18 years. In addition, we examined the associations between eight specific forms of ELS (ie, sexual abuse, physical abuse, poverty, physical illness/injury, death of a family member, domestic violence, natural disaster, and emotional abuse) and risk for youth-onset MDD. METHOD: We conducted a systematic search in scientific databases for studies that assessed both ELS and the presence or absence of MDD before age 18 years. We identified 62 journal articles with a total of 44,066 unique participants. We assessed study quality using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. When heterogeneous effect sizes were detected, we tested whether demographic and/or methodological factors moderated the association between ELS and MDD. RESULTS: Using a random-effects meta-analysis, we found that individuals who experienced ELS were more likely to develop MDD before the age of 18 years than were individuals without a history of ELS (odds ratio = 2.50; 95% confidence interval 2.08, 3.00). Separate meta-analyses revealed a range of associations with MDD: whereas some types of ELS (eg, poverty) were not associated with MDD, other types (eg, emotional abuse) were associated more strongly with MDD than was ELS considered more broadly. CONCLUSION: These findings provide important evidence that the adverse effect of ELS on MDD risk manifests early in development, prior to adulthood, and varies by type of ELS.