Inadequate Coping and Cognition

            Cognitive therapy has emphasized the importance of thought patterns in causing and sustaining depressed affect (Beck et al., 1979).  More recently, cognitive-behavioral understanding of adolescent depression has highlighted the importance of dysfunctional patterns of thought (Lipsker & Oordt, 1990).  Treatment strategies such a Rational-Emotive Therapy have found impressive outcomes with adults and are based on a comprehensive theory of thought, behavior, motivation and emotion (Bernard, 1988; Bernard, 1990; Bernard & Joyce, 1993; DiGiuseppe, 1989).  Children and adolescents are viewed as having an active role in acquiring training to think more accurately about their situations, relationships and problems.  By recognizing and correcting distorted, irrational thought patterns, they can experience improvements in their mood (DiGiuseppe, 1990; DiGiuseppe, 1993; DiGiuseppe & Bernard, 1990).  Such an approach contrasts with other treatment approaches which tend to view children as passive recipients of parental, social and environmental influences (DiGiuseppe, 1989).

            This last point may be significant for understanding the effects of commuting stress on the adolescent children of commuters. Commute impedance (e.g., a long commute) may have effects on the family in the form of spillover stress, but the precise effect on the individual child is likely to be mediated by the cognitive style of the child.  There is evidence that negative attributional style correlates with both self-reported and clinical depression among children and adolescents (Joiner & Wagner, 1995).  Thus, if parents with a long commute have greater dysphoric mood in the home and are available less often to the child than their short commuting counterparts, the child’s experience of the greater stress is mediated by his or her attributional style.  For example, a 12-year-old girl with a negative attributional style may draw irrational conclusions about herself after her parents display stressful, irritated behavior after a long commute.  She may think, “I never get it right,” as a function of her attributional style, instead of attributing the angry response of the parent to the parent’s own problems.

            We can also look at cognitive and attributional style as a skill that requires training to be developed.  There is strong evidence that children who are taught cognitive and social-problem solving techniques designed to prevent depressive symptoms will experience less depression in subsequent years (Gillham, Reivich, Jaycox, & Seligman, 1995). While these skills can be taught formally as part of a therapy or research program, the parent-child interactions characteristic of middle-school age children may entail informal training about attribution.  If adolescent children face new challenges to their budding coping skills, then perhaps parental coaching as to more rational attributions plays a role in mediating the effects of stressful life events.  This could mean that a parent who is stressed after a long commute may have less time and energy to engage with and train an adolescent son or daughter in more reasonable attributions concerning, for example, an insult he or she received that day at school.  Thus, commuting stress may decrease the kind of parental coaching necessary for adolescents to learn more adaptive patterns of attribution and better coping skills.  If so, the commuting stress of parents may indirectly result in a more depressed mood in their adolescent child.

            While cognitive-behavioral theory integrates social, cognitive, emotional, and physiological factors in understanding adolescent depression, it is conspicuously deficient in providing a developmental understanding (Weisz, Rudolph, Granger, & Sweeney, 1992).  This feature of the approach is what distinguishes it from similar constructs in Bowlby’s loss paradigm.  While Beck and colleagues (1979) and Bowlby (1980) each posit cognitive schemas to have characteristic features which result in people construing events negatively or positively, the cognitive paradigm virtually ignores the role of loss experienced earlier in the child’s development.  However, the two approaches may be viewed as compatible, with attachment and loss theory acting as a developmental enhancement to the cross-sectional approach of cognitive-behavioral therapy.  This compatibility is recognized by Bowlby (1980) who maintains that his developmental theory and cross-sectional approaches differ more by emphasis and are not mutually exclusive.

Emotional Regulation and Vulnerability to Depression

            Recently, a theoretical framework has been advanced that synthesizes the depth of attachment concepts with the breadth of the cognitive conceptualization of child and adolescent depression. McCauley and colleagues (1995) focused on internal risk factors of depression in children and formulated a model that attempts to integrate insights from attachment theory with the concepts surrounding cognitive coping style.  In essence, this theory of emotional regulation maintains that a child’s attachment relationships make a significant contribution to the development of a depressogenic cognitive style (Cummings & Cicchetti, 1990; Hammen, 1992).

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