Though numerous studies have examined the relationship between parental overcontrol (OC) and child anxiety, few have examined the association between OC and children's depressive symptoms. However, there are conceptual reasons to believe that overcontrolling parenting may also be relevant to depressive symptomatology, as well as to anticipate that other aspects of the parent-child relationship may moderate the association between the two. In this study we examine the association between self-reported maternal OC and child depressive symptoms, as moderated by multiple indicators of closeness within the parent-child relationship. An ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of children (N = 106, M(age) = 10.27 years) and their mothers participated in this cross-sectional study. Mothers reported on their overcontrolling parenting and children reported on their depressive symptoms. Children and mothers participated in structured interviews that were analyzed for we-talk, a behavioral measure of closeness; they also self-reported their closeness. Results indicated that child we-talk, child self-reported closeness, and maternal we-talk moderated the association between maternal OC and child depressive symptoms, such that OC and depressive symptoms were positively associated only at low levels of relational closeness. The results provide initial evidence for an association between parental OC and child depressive symptoms, and point to the need for more research on the role of children's perceptions in moderating the association between parenting and child depressive symptoms.

Little is known about the words that romantic couples use during emotionally heightened moments such as when feeling annoyed with their partner. In the present study, young adult couples received mobile phones that audio-recorded 50% of their day and prompted hourly self-reports of partner-related annoyance. Actor–partner models tested within-person (hourly) and between-person (across the day) associations between feelings of annoyance and spoken anger words; furthermore, exposure to retrospectively assessed parent-to-child aggression (PCA) was examined as a moderator of these links. Men reporting more annoyance across the day as well as greater PCA used more overall anger words. For women, hourly anger words fluctuated in relation to men’s annoyance; moreover, greater PCA strengthened the link between women’s own hourly reported annoyance and anger words. Our findings highlight nuances in couples’ communication of everyday relationship distress and point to the role of PCA in next-generation romantic relationships.

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Depression is a common, often recurrent disorder that causes substantial disease burden worldwide, and this is especially true for women following the pubertal transition. According to the Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression, stressors involving social stress and rejection, which frequently precipitate major depressive episodes, induce depressive symptoms in vulnerable individuals in part by altering the activity and connectivity of stress-related neural pathways, and by upregulating components of the immune system involved in inflammation. To test this theory, we recruited adolescent females at high and low risk for depression and assessed their psychological, neural, inflammatory, and genomic responses to a brief (10 minute) social stress task, in addition to trait psychological and microbial factors affecting these responses. We then followed these adolescents longitudinally to investigate how their multi-level stress responses at baseline were related to their biological aging at baseline, and psychosocial and clinical functioning over one year. In this protocol paper, we describe the theoretical motivations for conducting this study as well as the sample, study design, procedures, and measures. Ultimately, our aim is to elucidate how social adversity influences the brain and immune system to cause depression, one of the most common and costly of all disorders.

Objective Adolescent girls who grow up with mothers who are depressed are themselves highly vulnerable to developing depression (i.e., “intergenerational transmission of depression”). Stressor exposure is a strong risk factor for depression, and the transmission of depression risk from mothers to daughters is partly due to mothers experiencing more stressors, increasing daughters' stressor burden. However, research in this area has only assessed recent stressors, making the role of cumulative lifetime stressors unclear. Method To address this issue, we recruited 52 dyads of mothers and adolescent daughters, of which 22 daughters were at high maternal risk for depression. Participants completed diagnostic interviews, and daughters additionally self‐reported their depressive symptoms. Participants also completed the Stress and Adversity Inventory, a new‐generation instrument for assessing cumulative lifetime history of acute and chronic stressors based on the contextual threat approach. We tested moderated mediation models evaluating the conditional indirect effects of mothers' lifetime stressors on high‐ versus low‐risk daughters' depressive symptoms through daughters' lifetime stressors. Results As hypothesized, mothers of high‐risk (but not low‐risk) adolescent daughters who reported more lifetime acute stressors had daughters who reported more lifetime acute stressors and current depressive symptoms. Moreover, this finding was driven specifically by mothers' stressors occurring after their daughters' births. There was also tentative evidence that high‐risk daughters' lifetime chronic stressors potentiated the impact of daughters' acute stressors on their depressive symptoms. Conclusion These findings provide new insights into how stressful contexts are transmitted intergenerationally.