Assessing Risk Factors for Depression in Adolescents: Necessary or Sufficient Conditions?

Introduction: Depression is a prevalent mental disorder that significantly challenges global health, largely due to its association with a high risk of suicide. Recent findings have shown a rise in both subclinical symptoms and fully developed depression during adolescence, emphasizing the critical need for early preventive interventions. Understanding the relationship between various cognitive risk factors and depression in adolescence is therefore crucial. These cognitive risk factors, derived from prominent theories of depression such as Beck’s cognitive theory, the hopelessness theory, and the response styles theory, are hypothesized to be both necessary and sufficient conditions for the development of a full-blown depressive disorder in adulthood. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the role of these factors in the onset of depression among adolescents. Method: This study utilized a longitudinal dataset over one year, with four waves of data collection on depressive symptoms and cognitive risk factors among adolescents (N = 519; mean age = 15.33 years; 63% female). A relative importance analysis determined the extent to which each cognitive vulnerability mechanism—cognitive errors, automatic thoughts, the negative cognitive triad, brooding, and stressful events—contributed to explaining the variance in subclinical depressive symptoms across the study period. Results: The analysis showed that automatic thoughts, the cognitive triad, and brooding were the most significant contributors to the variance in depressive symptoms throughout the four waves. Specifically, focusing on the fourth wave only, automatic thoughts accounted for 12.10%, the cognitive triad for 14.33%, and brooding for 7.75% of the variance in depressive symptoms. The robustness of these findings was affirmed through cross-validation analysis, suggesting that the model is probably reproducible in similar adolescent populations. Discussion: The findings suggested that automatic thoughts, the cognitive triad, and brooding are critical risk factors in the onset and vulnerability to depression and should be prioritized in preventive interventions.