Differential Reporting of Adolescent Stress as a Function of Maternal Depression History

Depression is associated with pervasive impairment in multiple facets of life, and can be debilitating due to its severity (McDermott and Ebmeier 2009), recurrent nature (Vittengl et al. 2007), and high rate of comorbidity (Mineka et al. 1998). The high prevalence of depression further exacerbates its destructive effect, at both personal and societal levels. In adults, the prevalence of depression in women is roughly twice as high as in men (Kessler 2006). Additionally, there is a notable increase in incidence of depression during adolescence, a period marked by stressful events, concerns about self-image, and peer victimization (Ge et al. 1994; Hankin et al. 1998; Prinstein et al. 2001). Thus, women and adolescents are at particular risk for developing depression.

Women and adolescents’ elevated rates of depression create the potential for a vicious storm, as it is well documented that maternal depression can have many negative effects on youth, particularly during the vulnerable period of adolescence (Beardslee et al. 1998; Downey and Coyne 1990; Goodman et al. 2011). Maternal depression has been shown to be predictive of youth depression (Goodman and Gotlib 1999; Hammen et al. 2004), higher levels of stressful events among youth (Compas et al. 2002), and youth social adjustment problems (Breslau et al. 1988). Further, negative cognitive styles typically consolidate during adolescence, and exposure to mothers’ negative cognitive styles during adolescence may lead to the development of similar maladaptive styles in offspring (Goodman and Gotlib 1999; Hankin 2008).

Consequently, understanding the relationship between depressed mothers and their adolescents is important; unfortunately, reliably studying this relationship has been problematic because of inherent discrepancies when multiple informants assess the same construct (for a review, see De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005). Although variance in discrepant reporting can be partially attributed to random error (De Los Reyes 2011) and the reporter’s environment (Achenbach et al. 1987), a substantial portion of the variance may be accounted for by reporter characteristics (Briggs-Gowan et al. 1996). As researchers often attempt to consolidate information from mothers and their children, maternal characteristics such as depression have been investigatory priorities in the discrepancy literature.

A majority of research that examines the influence of maternal depression on discrepant reports with their children is informed by the depression–distortion hypothesis. The depression–distortion hypothesis (Richters and Pellegrini 1989) posits that maternal depression is associated with negatively-biased discrepancies when reporting on child characteristics, a discrepancy not observed in nondepressed mothers. Depressed mothers have exhibited negatively-biased reporting discrepancies of youth behavioral problems (Chi and Hinshaw 2002; Youngstrom et al. 1999), depressive symptoms (Richters 1992; Youngstrom et al. 2000), and social interactions (Youngstrom et al. 1999) relative to their children. Further, it may be misleading to assume that nondepressed individuals are accurate reporters. Although not studied explicitly in the context of mother–youth discrepancies, nondepressed individuals have exhibited optimistic cognitive biases, through which they overestimate their control over events, provide self-enhancing judgments about their successes and personal characteristics, and exhibit a bias to recall events more favorably than what objectively occurred (Alloy and Abramson 1979, 1988; Taylor and Brown 1988). Maternal depression’s role in reporting discrepancies between mothers and their children remains an understudied topic, as it has almost exclusively focused on youth psychopathological and behavioral outcomes.

Surprisingly, the depression–distortion hypothesis has yet to be investigated in the context of youth stress, which warrants attention given the increase in stressful events youth report experiencing during adolescence (Ge et al. 1994). A thorough examination entails investigating stress as more than a singular construct, as specificity of the type of stressor is considered an important distinction when studying negative adolescent life events. Depression research often distinguishes between independent stressors (events that an individual has no contribution to, such as natural disasters) and dependent stressors (events that are at least partially attributed to the behavior of an individual, such as peer conflicts; Hammen 2005). Stressful life events in general are a risk factor for depression (Monroe and Harkness 2005), but dependent life events are more strongly associated with depression onset and maintenance (Liu and Alloy 2010), and depressed individuals experience more episodic stress than nondepressed individuals due to personal characteristics (Hammen 2005). More generally, negative life events can also be investigated by content-domains (e.g., family, achievement, social, financial, legal, etc.), and different domains of life stress have differing influences on psychopathology (for a review, see Monroe and Simons 1991).

The increased risk of psychopathology and maladjustment for adolescents with a depressed mother is disheartening. Reporting discrepancies between mothers and their children exacerbate the problem by making it harder to ascertain adjustment problems children are facing; hence, it becomes difficult to reliably study the mother–youth relationship and subsequently discern mechanisms of intergenerational psychopathology transmission. No study to our knowledge has examined whether mothers with a history of depression differentially acknowledge their adolescents’ stressful experiences compared with nondepressed mothers. Given the importance of making specific distinctions within the stress literature, there is great utility in deriving a better understanding of how inter-reporter discrepancies manifest based not only on overall youth stress reporting, but also on the type of stressor.

We hypothesized that mothers with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) would differ in their reporting of adolescent stress from nondepressed mothers. Specifically, mothers with a history of MDD would be more likely to report more stressors in their adolescent children’s lives than their children’s reports, and mothers with no history of depression would be more likely to report fewer stressors in their children’s lives than their children’s reports. The hypothesis was informed by the depression–distortion hypothesis (Richters and Pellegrini 1989), such that depressed mothers are posited to show negatively-biased report discrepancies with their children, which we believed would be congruent with an increased reporting of youth negative life events. If our hypotheses were supported and there were significant group differences, we proposed to further explore whether the tendency for mothers to over- or under-report relative to their children’s reports differed by the domain of the stressor (Academic, Family, and Social life events) and the dependence of the events (Independent of versus Dependent on the child).

The aim of the current study was to examine the discrepancy in reporting of adolescents’ stressful events between mothers with and without a history of major depression. Prior literature highlights the problematic nature of reporter discrepancy due to a history of depression (De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005). The main findings of the current study supported the hypothesis that maternal reporting of the stressful events of their children differed based on whether or not the mother had a prior diagnosis of depression. Consistent with the depression-distortion hypothesis (Richters and Pellegrini 1989), mothers with a prior diagnosis of depression reported more negative life events compared to their children than did nondepressed mothers. Although mothers with no history of depression were significantly more likely to report fewer events than their children only for independent life events, there was a consistent trend of reporting less events than their children for all discrepancy outcomes. Mothers with and without a history of depression exhibited a similar degree of absolute discrepancy from their children, indicating that the direction of discrepancy (over versus under) is the central distinction. Taken together, this suggests that mothers’ reporting of stressful events that occur in their children’s lives is discrepant based on the presence versus absence of a history of maternal depression.

The tendency for mothers with a history of MDD to over-report youth total stress (relative to their children) significantly more than nondepressed mothers may be driven by their tendency to over-report stress in the Family and Social domains. Although mothers may be expected to be accurate reporters of familial stress given their central role in family affairs, and adolescents may be expected to be better reporters of social stress given that parents are not observers in all social contexts, our results indicate that mothers with a history of MDD report more stressors in both of these domains than their children. Academic stressors, though trending in a similar direction as the other domains, may have exhibited less mother-youth discrepancy than social and family stressors because there are typically more objective indicators of youth academic stress readily available to both mothers and their children. For example, ALEQ Academic events such as “Got a report card with a C-average or less” and “Suspended or expelled from school” are more likely to be identified by both parties as occurring (e.g., the school would notify parents if the child was suspended) than many Family and Social events (e.g., “Friends pressured you to do things you didn’t want to do”). However, consistency across all three domains suggests a generalized tendency for mothers with a depression history to report more events relative to their children than nondepressed mothers.

Further, the tendency for mothers with a history of MDD to report more stressors that children contribute to (i.e., Dependent events) may suggest that maternal negative cognitive styles (inherent in depressive self-report biases) extrapolate to misappraisal of events when reporting on their children. Depressed individuals are more likely to self-focus (Pyszczynski et al. 1989), ruminate on negative life events (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991), and interpret neutral evaluations as negatively-valenced (Gotlib 1983). A similar schema of attributing events to personal deficits and characteristics may help explain why mothers with a history of MDD tend to report more stressors than their children that are in some way dependent on the child’s behaviors and characteristics. Our study illuminates that report discrepancies for youth-dependent stressors differ based on the presence versus absence of a maternal history of depression, but future research that incorporates objective measures of youth stress is necessary to investigate the mechanisms that may explain the relationship. Although mothers with no history of depression were more likely to under-report independent events relative to their children than mothers with a history of MDD, this discrepancy was not significantly exhibited overall, by content-domain, or for dependent stressors. Thus, replication is necessary to more strongly suggest that nondepressed mothers have a tendency to report less youth stress relative to their children.

This is the first study to extend the body of literature examining reporting discrepancy between parents and their children to the reporting of adolescents’ life experiences. Research has highlighted discrepancy between parent–child reporting of children’s psychopathology and behaviors, yet no research to date has examined this difference in the stress literature. Stressful events are consistently predictive of episodes of depression (Hammen 2005) and other forms of psychopathology (Grant et al. 2004). Upon close examination of the youth stress literature, researchers employ inconsistent methodologies in the collection of stress data that they then use to draw their conclusions. Although some researchers use only parent or only child reported life stress information, much research makes an attempt to combine both reports. The current study highlights that these attempts to understand the true occurrences of negative life events in youths’ lives may be discrepant based on a history of maternal depression. The potential consequence of utilizing discrepant data is inconsistent findings, which may amplify the role of stress as a risk factor for depression if life stress information does not take into account parental influence on reporting.

De Los Reyes and Kazdin (2005) proposed a theoretical framework to guide researchers in decreasing biases based on information discrepancy. The ABC Model attempts to incorporate the perspective of the reporter and combine data from multiple informants. This model is informed by the actor-observer phenomenon, memory recall research, and general heuristics that may influence biased information that leads to discrepant reports. Whereas this model was proposed to explain differences in the interpretation of behavior related to psychopathology, similar processes are likely in play when reporting negative life events. Individuals’ own attributions influence their memory and recall of events and thus may bias their contextual interpretation of events. Although we cannot determine biases from this study, it is possible that mothers with a history of MDD are hyperaware of youth stressors and are more accurate reporters; or, alternatively, they may be interpreting more events as stressful than objectively occurred.

However, inter-reporter discrepancies are thought to be conceptually linked with reporter biases, and studies have demonstrated that such discrepancies are associated with self-report biases inherent to depression and related constructs (De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005). Subsequently, future research can examine if maternal negative cognitive styles (inherently regarded as perceptual biases) mediate the relationship between maternal depression and stress discrepancy scores when an objective measure of youth stress is available. Individuals with depression have exhibited self-report biases due to mood-congruent processing (Elliott et al. 2002), ruminative attention biases (Lavender and Watkins 2004), and negatively-biased autobiographical memories (Lyubomirsky et al. 1998). Extrapolation of these self-report biases to inter-reporter biases is a worthy endeavor to better understand the mechanisms underlying mother–youth discrepancies. Future research may also benefit from the use of the ABC Model’s theoretical framework as a translational tool to more adequately and systematically ascertain information from multiple sources.

Interpretation of the present results should take into account the relative strengths and limitations of the current study. This novel investigation of discrepant reporting of life stress utilized a large sample of racially diverse early adolescents and their mothers. Current adolescent and maternal depressive symptoms and diagnoses were controlled for to reduce the influence that current mood state had on reporting biases (Elliott et al. 2002; Gotlib 1983). Further, the number of youth reported events was controlled for, as a greater number of youth reported events statistically increase the likelihood of discrepancies with their mothers. This rationale was supported by our results, as mothers were less likely to report a greater number of events relative to their children (i.e., over-report) if their children reported more events overall. Thus, we employed very conservative tests of our hypotheses for all analyses. The prospective design incorporated interview based diagnoses of depression, and only mothers who met for a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of MDD were identified as having a history of depression. Lewinsohn et al. (1981) proposed a scar hypothesis, whereby an episode of depression psychologically scars an individual in a way that increases their vulnerability to experience future distress. This scar may be evident in the current sample and influence the reporting of events, a postulation strengthened by the minimal variance accounted for by current maternal depressive symptoms and diagnoses. Although we expected that current maternal mood would be predictive of reporting discrepancy, it is possible that assessing for a history of maternal depression better captures the general influence of depression on reporting (i.e., scar hypothesis), whereas current mood state was assessed at a single time point and exhibited less variation across participants.

Alternatively, this study was limited by the use of checklists of negative life events. Although children are accurate informants about their own thoughts and feelings (Boyle et al. 1996), self-report checklists completed by mothers and children may be biased by various factors; thus, interpretation of the data should take this into account. Sources of biases can include social desirability (i.e., the participant is aware of a negative event, but withholding acknowledgement of the event so as not to be negatively judged by the researchers), memory recall deficits, and apathetic reporting (common in adolescents). Employing investigator-based contextual stress interviews (e.g., Hammen 2005) may be one option for reducing potential individual biases in future studies. Nonetheless, the use of self-reported stressors through a reliable and valid questionnaire is reasonable at this stage of investigation, as some research suggests that information derived from self-report checklists of stressors is comparable to information and associations obtained from life event interviews (Lewinsohn et al. 2003; Wagner et al. 2006). The current study hypothesized that nondepressed mothers would be more likely to under-report youth stress relative to the adolescents’ reports, and although this trend was consistent across analyses, only relative under-reporting of independent events was significantly different between groups. Furthermore, study results were based on the comparison of maternal reported events solely to adolescent reported events; ideally, future research could also incorporate the assessment of other informed individuals including fathers, teachers, and siblings.

Studying informant discrepancies in reporting life stress is important for researchers, clinicians, and families. Although life stress interviews are viewed as the ‘gold-standard’ method for obtaining information on events occurring in someone’s life, our results suggest the information gleaned from this approach may have important discrepancies and inconsistencies. Although researchers attempt to account for differences in reporting by combining reports, this may inevitably be a biased pursuit based on individual factors. The current research highlights the importance of taking into account individual factors that may influence reporting so that steps can be made to reduce such discrepancies (De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005). Clinically, it may be important to ascertain accurate and in-depth histories of the child and family in order to more fully understand factors that may influence the reporting and interpretation of events. This study highlights a history of depression as a factor that may influence a parent to over-report events, but also calls attention to the possibility that mothers without such history may under-report events relative to their children. This may help clinicians to incorporate information from multiple sources more accurately and better interpret this information to influence treatment approaches and goals. Furthermore, an understanding of such discrepancies can be informative in developing adolescent treatment programs, as emphasizing parental involvement may benefit from additional training with parents on understanding their own interpretational predispositions. Finally, differences in the report and interpretation of events as stressful may influence parent–child and family functioning. A parent’s history of psychopathology may affect parenting practices as well as the perception of events as stressful. A more complete understanding of how parental characteristics influence their own views on the world may enhance their relationship with their children.