Temperament in Remitted Depression: The Role of Effortful Control and Attentional Mechanisms

Temperament in adulthood is increasingly investigated as an underlying mechanism in depression and anxiety symptoms. More specifically, effortful control and attentional networks efficiency have recently received great attention as a potential vulnerability process. However, it is still unknown whether these factors facilitate depressive and anxiety symptoms in the general population and, more specifically, in remitted depressed individuals. Hence, we investigated to what extent effortful control and attentional networks (i.e., Attention Network Task) explain concurrent depressive and anxious symptoms in healthy individuals (n=270) and remitted depressed individuals (n=90). Both samples were highly representative of the US population. Our analysis showed that increased effortful control predicted a substantial decrease in symptoms of both depression and anxiety in the whole sample, whereas decreased efficiency of executive attention predicted a modest increase in depressive symptoms. Remitted depressed individuals did not show less effortful control nor less efficient attentional networks than healthy individuals. Moreover, clinical status did not moderate the relationship between temperamental factors and either depressive or anxiety symptoms. Exploratory single-symptom analysis was also performed. Limitations include the cross-sectional nature of the study. In conclusion, our study showed that temperamental effortful control represents an important transdiagnostic process for depressive and anxiety symptoms in adults.