The Association Between Children’s Beliefs About Emotions and Symptoms of Depression

Abstract

This dissertation examines the association between children’s beliefs about the malleability of emotions and their symptoms of depression. In Study 1a, I report on the development of a novel method of assessing beliefs about emotions (the Implicit Theories of Emotions Scale – Child version; ITES-C) to quantify the extent to which children believe that their own emotions, and those of others, can be changed. Results supported the psychometric properties (e.g., reliability) of this measure. In Study 1b, I report on a subset of the children (n = 15) with heightened levels of depressive symptoms in Study 1a (CDI ≥ 9) who completed a 13-week school-based treatment for depression, after which their beliefs about emotions and depressive symptoms were again assessed. There were two primary findings: (1) the discrepancy between children’s beliefs about their own emotions and others’ emotions strongly predicted treatment response; and (2) children whose beliefs about their own emotions changed most over the course of treatment also experienced the greatest treatment response. These results provide provisional support for the hypothesis that beliefs about the malleability of emotions are associated with a better response to treatment for depression, although the nature of this association remains unclear. In Study 2, I report on an experiment designed to increase the malleability of children’s beliefs about emotions. Participants were community children ages 10-12 years who were randomly assigned to either a psychoeducational online intervention (Session 1) lasting less than 9 minutes explaining the biological nature of emotion and how it can be changed, or to a control condition focused on the biological nature of memory. One week later (Session 2), participants viewed a brief video testimonial of an adolescent describing how he learned to change his emotion or improve his memory (depending on condition). There were significant group by time interactions for both explicitly-measured beliefs about emotions and implicit beliefs about negative emotions, suggesting that the intervention was efficacious. Overall, the results of these studies show that children’s beliefs about emotions: (a) can be reliably measured with this new instrument; (b) are associated both with concurrent and future depressive symptoms; and (c) can be changed via a brief online intervention. Future studies on this topic should focus on larger samples of children with more severe depressive symptoms and should further test whether interventions such as the one developed and evaluated in Study 2 can be used as a pre-treatment adjunctive intervention to boost the effects of more traditional psychological interventions aimed at modifying children’s emotions.