The Psychopathology of Worthlessness in Depression

作者：Phillippa Harrison, Andrew J. Lawrence, Shu Wang, Sixun Liu, Guangrong Xie, Xinhua Yang, Roland Zahn · 发表于：Frontiers in Psychiatry · 年份：2022 · 被引用次数：48 · 研究领域：Mental Health Research Topics、Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes、Personality Disorders and Psychopathology

Background Despite common dissatisfaction with the syndromic heterogeneity of major depression, investigations into its symptom structure are scarce. Self-worthlessness/inadequacy is a distinctive and consistent symptom of major depression across cultures. Aims We investigated whether self-worthlessness is associated with self-blaming attribution-related symptoms or is instead an expression of reduced positive feelings overall, as would be implied by reduced positive affect accounts of depression. Methods 44,161 undergraduate students in Study 1, and 215 patients with current Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and 237 age-matched healthy control participants in Study 2 completed the well-validated Symptom Check List-90. Depression-relevant items were used to construct regularized partial correlation networks with bootstrap estimates of network parameter variability. Results Worthlessness co-occurred more strongly with other symptoms linked to self-blaming attributions (hopelessness, and self-blame), displaying a combined edge weight with these symptoms which was significantly stronger than the edge weight representing its connection with reduced positive emotion symptoms (such as reduced pleasure/interest/motivation, difference in edge weight sum in Study 1 = 2.95, in Study 2 = 1.64; 95% confidence intervals: Study 1: 2.6–3.4; Study 2: 0.02–3.5; Bonferroni-corrected p < 0.05). Conclusions This confirms the prediction of the revised learned helplessness model that worthlessness i...