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The Role of Delay Discounting in the Generation of Stressful Life Events Across Adolescence - PubMed

The Role of Delay Discounting in the Generation of Stressful Life Events Across Adolescence

Julia W Felton et al. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

Hammen's (1991) model of stress generation suggests that depressed individuals are more likely to behave in ways that bring about greater exposure to negative life events. More recent research suggests that adolescents with other types of psychological vulnerabilities, including those more likely to make impulsive choices, may also be predisposed to experience greater increases in stress over time. The current study examined whether delay discounting (DD), defined as the tendency to prefer smaller but immediately available rewards relative to larger, delayed rewards, predicts the generation of negative life events across adolescence and whether this is due to the association between DD and depressive symptoms. Participants (n = 213, Mage = 15, range 12-17) completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms and negative life events, as well as a behavioral measure assessing DD annually over four years. Results of latent growth models suggest that both independent and dependent negative life events increased across adolescence. Consistent with a stress generation framework, DD predicted the growth in dependent, but not independent, negative life events over this time period, controlling for baseline levels of depressive symptoms. Further exploratory analyses suggest that DD was associated with increases in depressive symptomology across adolescence, but that the relation between DD and changes in independent negative life events was not better accounted for by increases in depressive symptoms over time. Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of DD in predicting youths' exposure to dependent negative life events and point to potential avenues for clinical intervention.

Keywords: Adolescents; Delay Discounting; Depression; Stress.

© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interests to disclose.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1

Graph of Mean Levels of Dependent Life Events across Timepoints for Youth with Low, Medium, and High Levels of Delay Discounting (DD)

Fig. 2
Fig. 2

Exploratory Parallel Process Growth Model

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