Depressive thinking and depression: Relations with personality and social resources.

We studied depression, depressive cognitions, social supports, and self-esteem in a sample of 68 spouse-caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's Disease in an attempt to identify possible buffering mechanisms of the latter 2 variables. Specifically, we hypothesized that the well-known relation of depressive cognitions to depression would vary as a function of satisfaction with social supports and with level of self-esteem. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses conducted to predict depression revealed significant and independent main effects for depressive cognitions, social supports, and self-esteem, with depressive cognitions associated with higher depression and the other 2 variables associated with reduced depression. In addition, the relation of depressive cognitions with depression varied substantially depending on the level of social supports; caregivers with high levels of depressive cognitions had high levels of depression only if social supports were low. Self-esteem and depressive cognitions showed a similar interaction, but it failed to reach significance. Analyses to determine whether self-esteem and social supports were directly associated with lower depressive cognitive activity yielded a main effect for self-esteem only. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)