Personality and depression in women

Thomas A. Widiger, Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt, Kristen G. Anderson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Everybody has a personality, or a characteristic manner of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating to others. Some persons are typically introverted and withdrawn; others are more extraverted and outgoing. Some persons are characteristically agreeable, cooperative, and even altruistic, whereas others might be consistently argumentative, self-centered, and exploitative. The personality traits that distinguish one person from another have been shown to have substantial temporal stability, heritability, cross-situational consistency, and functional relevance to a wide variety of important life outcomes, including (but not limited to) career success, well-being, marital stability, and physical health (Pervin & John, 1999). Personality traits are important to consider when attempting to explain gender differences in depression for two fundamental reasons. First, there is a considerable amount of research indicating that some personality traits do provide a vulnerability to the occurrence of mood disorders, and, second, these personality traits have been shown to obtain consistent gender differences. DEPENDENCY, DEPRESSION, AND WOMEN One of the more heavily researched personality dispositions for the development of depressive episodes is the personality trait of dependency (Clark, Watson, & Mineka, 1994). Dependency has been studied extensively within general personality research, assessed typically by the Depressive Experience Questionnaire (Blatt & Zuroff, 1992; Santor, Zuroff, & Fielding, 1997), the Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale (SAS; Robins, Hayes, Block, Kramer, & Villena, 1995), the Personality Style Inventory (Robins et al., 1995), or the Interpersonal Dependency Inventory (IDI; Hirschfield et al., 1977).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWomen and Depression
Subtitle of host publicationA Handbook for the Social, Behavioral, and Biomedical Sciences
Pages176-198
Number of pages23
ISBN (Electronic)9780511841262
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2006

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This paper was written for the Summit on Women and Depression held at the Wye River Conference Center, Queenstown, MD, on October 5–7, 2000, and sponsored by the American Psychological Association in conjunction with the Bureau of Primary Health Care, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Women’s Health.

Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2006.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Psychology (all)

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