Hostility, Interpersonal Competence, and Daily Dependent Stress: A Daily Model of Stress Generation

We evaluated whether participants’ repeated monitoring of their sadness and hostility influenced their morning mood over the course of the study. Using HLM, we tested the relationship between study day (1–7) and the two morning mood variables. Sadness and hostility did not change during the study.

Table 2 correlations indicate that initial depressive symptoms and trait hostility were significantly related to mean morning sadness and hostility, respectively, and that past year’s negative events were significantly related to mean number of daily dependent stressors. We also conducted our analyses without gender, past year’s negative events, initial depressive symptoms, and trait hostility as controls. Results with and without these controls were the same.

Hierarchical models involving a count outcome variable (e.g., discrete number of events) are typically conducted using a Poisson distribution rather than a normal distribution (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002; Snijders and Bosker 1999). However, initial comparison of the results using both methods showed that they did not differ. Thus, we present models using a normal distribution for ease of interpretation.

We also examined the effect of morning mood on the type of event reported as the day’s most stressful, specifically whether it was a dependent or independent event. Hostility, but not sadness, had a significant impact on the worst event of the day, such that increases in hostility were associated with an increased likelihood that the worst event of the day would be dependent.

We also examined the effects of daily hostility and daily sadness without inclusion of the other affect variable in the model. Results for daily hostility and sadness did not change.

We also conducted separate analyses for dependent stressors that were interpersonal in nature and those that were not. For participants overall (men and women combined), hostility predicted the occurrence of dependent interpersonal stressors, but not non-interpersonal stressors. We then repeated these analyses separately for each gender. For women, hostility predicted dependent interpersonal, but not non-interpersonal, stressors, and ICQ Initiation was a moderator of the hostility-dependent interpersonal stress relationship in the same direction as reported previously. No effects were significant for men. However, it should be noted that 67% of reported dependent stressors were interpersonal in nature. The greater frequency of interpersonal stressors makes it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the importance of whether dependent stressors are interpersonal or not.