| Assessment |
Community children followed from middle childhood through entry to middle school. Careful assessment of prior depression episodes to distinguish vulnerability from scar. Attention to pubertal maturation, cognitive development, latent and explicit measures of cognitive vulnerability and stress. Onset of clinical disorder assessed every six months. Youth followed through remission and relapse to establish whether vulnerabilities apply to first onset only. Study of rumination and problem solving as possible cognitive vulnerabilities. Integration of emotional priming and information processing paradigms.
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| Analyses |
Map normal and abnormal trajectories through growth mixture modeling to increase the likelihood that reciprocal effects between cognition and mood will be captured. Analyses which account for initial level of depression, as models may only apply to asymptomatic at baseline sub-samples. Integrative and transactional models (e.g. Hankin & Abramson, 2001) assessing the roles of vulnerabilities in relation to one another.
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| Interdisciplinary collaboration |
Establish developmental trajectories and ‘normal benchmarks’ of cognitive processes, allowing cognitive vulnerability factors to be distinguished from normative developmental differences. Cortisol assessment allowing for integration with biological underpinnings of depression. Establish a taxonomy system with established age norms for stress (Grant et al., 2004a) to facilitate developmental frameworks and allow for comparison of stressors across samples.
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