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Cognitive Organization, Perceptions of Parenting and Depression Symptoms in Early Adolescence

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Abstract

Despite its strong relation to depression and theorized development across childhood and adolescence, cognitive schema organization has not been explored in early adolescence, a sensitive developmental period for first depression onset. Schema organization is theorized to derive from childhood cognitive internalizations of caregiving relationships, such as critical parenting experiences (e.g., Young et al. in Schema therapy: a practitioner’s guide. Guilford Press, New York, 2003). Thus, the current investigation considers the organization of positive and negative schemas with youth’s perceptions of parental warmth and psychological control and self-reported emotional functioning. Participants were 198 boys and girls aged 9–14 years who completed the Psychological Distance Scaling Task, measures of perceptions of parenting behaviors, anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms. Consistent with hypotheses, higher depression, but not anxiety symptoms were associated with a loosely-interconnected positive schema organization and a tightly-interconnected negative schema organization. Parental responsiveness emerged as the strongest predictor of negative schema structure. Implications for cognitive-developmental theories of depression and early identification of depression risk are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Note that partial correlations controlling for sex and ethnicity yielded little to no impact on the magnitude of the relations between depression symptoms and parenting (all r’s > ±.48).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ontario Mental Health Foundation New Investigator Fellowship (first author). We are very grateful to the Wellington Catholic District School Board for their support of our youth mood research and to the youth and parents who participated in this project. We also wish to thank Drs. Heidi Bailey, Paula Barata, and Stephen Lewis for their helpful comments on this research. We are grateful to all the members of the Resilient Youth Research Group for their research efforts in the schools and in particular to Bethany Lerman and Rachel Hohenadel for their extraordinary organizational skills and valuable contributions to many aspects of this project. We also wish to thank Wray Hutton for his guidance on appropriate computer infrastructure and his computer-programming expertise.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada

    M. N. Lumley, K. H. Hennig & A. Marsh

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    D. J. A. Dozois & A. Marsh

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  1. M. N. Lumley
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  2. D. J. A. Dozois
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  3. K. H. Hennig
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  4. A. Marsh
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Correspondence to M. N. Lumley.

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Lumley, M.N., Dozois, D.J.A., Hennig, K.H. et al. Cognitive Organization, Perceptions of Parenting and Depression Symptoms in Early Adolescence. Cogn Ther Res 36, 300–310 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-011-9365-z

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