According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) depression is considered a mental state of altered mood characterized by sadness, desperation, anhedonia and decreased interest in daily life activities, subjective sensation of discomfort, feelings of worthlessness and lack of self-esteem. Therefore apathy can be an aspect of depression in the manner in which there ...

OBJECTIVE This article focuses on the lived experience of depression in 20 elderly African American women. METHODS Data on depression emerged from research that qualitatively explored experiences of depression, sadness, and suffering in 120 community-dwelling persons aged 80 and older, stratified by gender, ethnicity, and self-reported health. RESULT We placed women's narratives under three...

Rumination is considered a specific cognitive vulnerability factor that is thought to play a prominent role in the maintenance of depressive symptoms. The present study investigated the psychometric properties of two measures of rumination, the ruminative response scale (RRS) and the rumination on sadness scale (RSS) in undergraduates (N=331). A joint factor analysis yielded three factors, 'rum...

Rumination is a risk factor for aggression and depression, yet few studies have incorporated both aggression and depression in a unitary model that reflects how rumination predicts these distinct conditions. The current study examined rumination on anger and sadness to assess their unique relations with aggression and depressed mood, respectively. Analogous anger rumination and sadness ruminati...

Research has not resolved whether depression is associated with a distinct information-processing bias, whether the content of the information-processing bias in depression is specific to themes of loss and sadness, or whether biases are consistent across the tasks most commonly used to assess attention and memory processing. In the present study, participants diagnosed with major depression, s...

Cognitive theories of depression suggest that mood-reactive self-esteem, a pattern of cognitive reactivity where low self-esteem is temporally dependent on levels of sadness, represents vulnerability for depression. Few studies have directly tested this hypothesis, particularly using intensive data collection methods (i.e., experience sampling) required to capture the temporal dynamics of sadne...

BACKGROUND Mood symptoms are highly prevalent among frail old people residing in nursing homes. Systematic diagnostics of depression is scarce, and treatment is not always in accordance with best evidence. The distinction between non-pathological sadness and depression may be challenging, and we know little of the older peoples' perspectives. The aim of this qualitative interview study was to e...

BACKGROUND Symptoms of depression are often reported among patients with a cancer diagnosis. Strong sense of coherence (SOC) is shown to be associated with less depression in the general older population and among nursing homes (NH) residents in particular. Knowledge about mixed-methods perspectives that examine symptoms of depression and SOC among cognitively intact NH residents with cancer is...

PURPOSE This research examined whether the frequencies of specific emotions are associated with major and minor depression in older primary care patients. DESIGN AND METHODS Older primary care patients (N = 146), prescreened with a depression questionnaire, completed a diagnostic interview and an emotions questionnaire. RESULTS Controlling for age, sex, and other psychiatric and medical ill...

Sadness is considered by numerous authors to be a core symptom of depression. Currently, many arguments exist for its particular importance in depressed patients. Sadness makes up part of the various definitions of the depressive syndrome, even if its presence is not required for diagnosis. Furthermore, it is closely linked to the other depressive symptoms, and has prognostic value, in particul...