Rumination Mediates the Relationship between Infant Temperament and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms

This study examined prospective associations between negative emotionality, rumination, and depressive symptoms in a community sample of 301 youths (158 females) followed longitudinally from birth to adolescence. Mothers reported on youths' negative emotionality (NE) at age 1, and youths self-reported rumination at age 13 and depressive symptoms at ages 13 and 15. Linear regression analyses indicated that greater NE in infancy was associated with more depressive symptoms at age 15, even after controlling for child gender and depressive symptoms at age 13. Moreover, analyses indicated that rumination significantly mediated the association between infancy NE and age 15 depressive symptoms in the full sample. When analyzed separately by gender, however, rumination mediated the relationship between NE and depressive symptoms for girls but not for boys. The results confirm and extend previous findings on the association between affective and cognitive vulnerability factors in predicting depressive symptoms and the gender difference in depression in adolescence, and suggest that clinical interventions designed to reduce negative emotionality may be useful supplements to traditional cognitive interventions for reducing cognitive vulnerability to depression.