how do adolescents define depression? - cIRcle - University of ...

Chapter II: Literature Review
evaluative insight that can extend to the past, present, and future life directions, providing the
cognitive base for personal identity. Through self-understanding, one incorporates self-interests,
connects and differentiates from others, including persons, places, objects, or events. Social
understanding and self-understanding constantly inform each other. Self-awareness (or
equivalent measures like self-directed attention or ruminative responses) has links to depression
in adolescents (Hansell & Mechanic, 1985; Mechanic & Hansell, 1987).
In their research, Mechanic and Hansell (1987) found that a higher score of self-
awareness was more likely to be associated with adolescent depression. In a longitudinal study of
adolescents followed in four Waves in grades 7, 8, 9, and post-high school (where the mean age
was 20.7 years), Chen, Mechanic, and Hansell (1998) suggest that there seemed to be a mutual
influence between self-awareness and depressed mood throughout adolescence, most apparent
during middle adolescence with no gender difference. In another two-Wave study of 802 and 686
students in grades 9 to 12, Allgood-Merten et al. (1990) found that girls were more aware of
inner states, more self-reflective, more publicly self-conscious, and had greater social anxiety
than boys.
Do Adolescents Think About Own Need to Talk to Someone When Feeling Depressed?
Adolescents' own appraisal or thinking about own need to talk to someone when
depressed can be one form of approach-oriented coping, and may be related to their conceptions
of depression and self-recognition of depression. Their thinking may also be informed by their
social relationships and their environment. An adolescent's decision that he or she needs to talk
to someone when depressed may either facilitate or discourage the action to talk to someone at
that time. Research in the understanding of approach-oriented coping specifically via thinking
about own need to talk to someone when depressed, its association to private mental state
processes such as self-recognition of depression, and its relationship to talking to someone when
feeling depressed is unexplored. However, approach-oriented coping has been explored in
association with depressive symptoms (Folkman & Lazarus, 1986; Herman-Stahl, Stemmler,
Petersen, 1995; Murberg & Bru, 2005; Seiffge-Krenke & Klessinger, 2000).
In a longitudinal study of the different types of coping styles on adolescents' depressive
symptoms, approachers reported the fewest depressive symptoms (Seiffge-Krenke & Klessinger,
2000). Adolescents' thinking about own need to talk to someone when depressed is one form of
32