Elsevier

Journal of Affective Disorders

Volume 159, 20 April 2014, Pages 66-72
Journal of Affective Disorders

Research report
Children at risk for depression: Memory biases, self-schemas, and genotypic variation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2014.02.020Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Daughters of depressed mothers are at increased risk for developing a depressive disorder. We know relatively little, however, about the specific factors that contribute to this elevated risk. The present study investigated the effects of familial risk for depression and the 5-HTTLPR and COMT Val158Met polymorphisms, which have been associated with risk for depression, on biases in endorsement of and memory for positive and negative adjectives.

Methods

Following a negative mood induction, 60 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 who had recurrent depressed mothers (high risk for depression) and 91 age-matched daughters of never-disordered mothers (low risk for depression) completed a Self-Referent Encoding Task in which they decided whether negative and positive adjectives described them. Following the task they were asked to recall as many of the adjectives as they could.

Results

Despite the absence of significant group differences in endorsement of positive or negative adjectives, high-risk girls with the COMT Val158Met Val/Val polymorphism recalled more positive (but not negative) words that they had endorsed than did high-risk girls who were homozygous for the Met allele. COMT was not associated with recall of valenced adjectives in low-risk girls. Across risk groups, 5-HTTLPR polymorphism was not associated with recall of valenced adjectives.

Limitations

Even with over 150 participants, there were relatively small numbers in some of the cells of this study, limiting its statistical power.

Conclusions

These results suggest that assessing the interaction of familial risk status and COMT polymorphism is important in understanding the development of depressive disorders.

Section snippets

Children at risk for depression: memory biases, self-schemas, and genotypic variation

Children of depressed parents are three to five times more likely to develop Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) during adolescence than are children with no family history of psychopathology (Hammen, 2009). Although environmental, psychological, and biological factors have been implicated as playing a role in this increased risk for the development of depression, the precise mechanisms are likely to be complex and multidimensional and are not yet fully understood.

Beck׳s cognitive model of

Participants

Participants were 151 girls between the ages of 9 and 14 (M=12.0, SD=1.5) with no current or past history of Axis I disorders included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Ninety-one of the girls had biological mothers with no current or past DSM-IV Axis I disorder, and 60 girls had biological mothers who had experienced at least two major depressive episodes during their daughter׳s lifetime.

Participant characteristics

Demographic and clinical characteristics, categorized by risk group and COMT polymorphism, are presented in Table 1. A chi-square analysis conducted on race/ethnicity and COMT polymorphism yielded a significant effect, χ2(5, N=157)=11.31, p<.05. Therefore, we included race/ethnicity as a covariate in subsequent analyses. A series of two-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs; risk group [low-risk, high-risk]×COMT group [Val/Val, Val/Met, Met/Met]) yielded no significant main effects of risk group or

Discussion and conclusion

The present study was designed to examine memory biases in girls at familial and genetic risk for depression. We did find that girls with both a family history of depression and two COMT Met alleles recalled a lower proportion of positive endorsed adjectives than did high-risk girls with two COMT Val alleles and low-risk girls with two COMT Met alleles. These findings suggest that girls who are homozygous Met carriers and are at familial risk for depression have a less positive self-schema than

Role of funding source

NIMH had no role in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Lauren Asarnow had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflict of interests to disclose.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH074849 awarded to Ian H. Gotlib.

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    1

    Lauren D. Asarnow is now at the University of California, Berkeley.

    2

    Renee J. Thompson is now at Washington University in St. Louis Missouri.

    3

    Jutta Joormann is now at Northwestern University.

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