Specificity in Personality and Cognitive Factors Associated with Drinking and Depressive Symptoms

Emotion-dependent language featuring depression

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Understanding language features of depression contributes to the detection of the disorder. Considering that depression is characterized by dysfunctions in emotion and individuals with depression often show emotion-dependent cognition, the present study investigated the speech features and word use of emotion-dependent narrations in patients with depression.

METHODS

Forty depression patients and forty controls were required to narrate self-relevant memories under five basic human emotions (i.e., sad, angry, fearful, neutral, and happy). Recorded speech and transcribed texts were analyzed.

RESULTS

Patients with depression, as compared to non-depressed individuals, talked slower and less. They also performed differently in using negative emotion, work, family, sex, biology, health, and assent words regardless of emotion manipulation. Moreover, the use of words such as first person singular pronoun, past tense, causation, achievement, family, death, psychology, impersonal pronoun, quantifier and preposition words displayed emotion-dependent differences between groups. With the involvement of emotion, linguistic indicators associated with depressive symptoms were identified and explained 71.6% variances of depression severity.

LIMITATIONS

Word use was analyzed based on the dictionary which does not cover all the words spoken in the memory task, resulting in text data loss. Besides, a relatively small number of depression patients were included in the present study and therefore the results need confirmation in future research using big emotion-dependent data of speech and texts.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that consideration of different emotional contexts is an effective means to improve the accuracy of depression detection via the analysis of word use and speech features.

To drink or not to drink: motives and expectancies for use and nonuse in adolescence

Drinking motives have a prominent role in cognitive models of adolescent and adult alcohol decision-making (Cooper, Russell, Skinner, & Windle, 1992; Cooper, 1994). The complementary construct of motivation not to drink has received less attention (Epler, Sher & Piasecki, 2009). We examined how abstinence motives interacted with drinking motives and alcohol expectancies to predict alcohol consumption in samples of US high school students (N>2500). Nondrinking motives predicted lower rates of lifetime and current alcohol use. Motives not to drink interacted with specific drinking motives, like social and coping motives, and alcohol expectancies to predict certain aspects of drinking behavior. For example, motives not to drink had the greatest impact on youth with weaker social motivations. Findings highlight the distinction between motives not to drink and other alcohol-related cognitions in predicting adolescent alcohol consumption. This work not only supports the utility of this construct in developing models of youth alcohol-related decision-making but also has implications for prevention programming.

Middle School Drinking: Who, Where, and When

The goal of this research was to describe the most common drinking situations for young adolescents (N=1171; 46.6% girls), as well as determine predictors of their drinking in the seventh and eighth grades. Middle school students most frequently drank at parties with three to four teens, in their home or at a friend's home, and reported alcohol-related problems including conflicts with friends or parents, memory loss, nausea, and doing things they would not normally do. Differences emerged in predicting higher levels of drinking on the basis of sex, race, grade, positive alcohol expectancies, impulsivity, and peer drinking. These findings suggest both specific and general factors are implicated in drinking for middle school students. Contextual factors, including drinking alone, in public places, and at or near school, are characteristic of the most problematic alcohol involvement in middle school and may have utility in prevention and early intervention.

Genetic and non-genetic influences on the development of co-occurring alcohol problem use and internalizing symptomatology in adolescence: a review

AIMS

Alcohol problem use during adolescence has been linked to a variety of adverse consequences, including cigarette and illicit drug use, delinquency, adverse effects on pubertal brain development and increased risk of morbidity and mortality. In addition, heavy alcohol-drinking adolescents are at increased risk of comorbid psychopathology, including internalizing symptomatology (especially depression and anxiety). A range of genetic and non-genetic factors have been implicated in both alcohol problem use as well as internalizing symptomatology. However, to what extent shared risk factors contribute to their comorbidity in adolescence is poorly understood.

DESIGN

We conducted a systematic review on Medline, PsycINFO, Embase and Web of Science to identify epidemiological and molecular genetic studies published between November 1997 and November 2007 that examined risk factors that may be shared in common between alcohol problem use and internalizing symptomatology in adolescence.

FINDINGS

Externalizing disorders, family alcohol problems and stress, as well as the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) S-allele, the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) low-activity alleles and the dopamine D2 receptor (DDR2) Taq A1 allele have been associated most frequently with both traits. An increasing number of papers are focusing upon the role of gene-gene (epistasis) and gene-environment interactions in the development of comorbid alcohol problem use and internalizing symptomatology.

CONCLUSIONS

Further research in adolescents is warranted; the increasing availability of large longitudinal genetically informative studies will provide the evidence base from which effective prevention and intervention strategies for comorbid alcohol problems and internalizing symptomatology can be developed.