Scientists find a difficult past may create a kind of psychological inoculation against future stress

A new study finds that a person’s recent experience with depression is linked to appraising stressful situations as more severe, while a history of early life adversity is associated with viewing them as less severe. The research, published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, introduces a new method for measuring how individuals judge stress and suggests that these personal judgments could play a role in maintaining depression.

Researchers have long sought to understand the complex relationship between stress and mental health. A key piece of this puzzle is stress appraisal, which is the personal cognitive and emotional process of evaluating how severe a stressful event is. Most methods to measure stress either ask people about their general feelings of being stressed or tally up specific life events, making it difficult to separate an event’s objective difficulty from an individual’s subjective reaction.

A team of researchers led by Elli Cole at the University of North Carolina Greensboro designed a study to address this gap, aiming to create a more precise way to examine how individual differences influence stress appraisal.

The team’s approach was to develop a standardized set of stressors that could be presented to all participants. They wrote 42 short stories, known as vignettes, describing a wide range of stressful life events. These scenarios covered different areas of life, including academics, finances, health, family, friendships, and romantic relationships. The events described ranged in difficulty from minor daily hassles to major life disruptions. Before the study began, the research team rated the severity of each of these 42 vignettes on a six-point scale, creating a baseline measure of severity for each event.

The main study involved 237 emerging adults, primarily university students. Each participant read all 42 vignettes. After reading each story, they were asked to rate on a 10-point scale how negatively they believed they would be personally impacted by that event. This procedure allowed the scientists to compare each person’s subjective appraisal to the researchers’ pre-determined severity rating for the same event. In addition to rating the vignettes, participants also completed a series of questionnaires that measured their history of early life adversity, their level of the personality trait neuroticism, and their most severe symptoms of depression over the past year.

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The first major finding confirmed the study’s design was effective. On average, as the researcher-rated severity of the vignettes increased, so did the participants’ own ratings of how negatively they would be impacted. This showed a general agreement between the objective and subjective ratings of stress. The analysis also revealed a slight flattening of this trend at the highest levels of severity, suggesting that people found it more difficult to distinguish between events that were very severe and those that were extremely severe.

When the researchers examined the influence of early life adversity, they found a result that went against their initial predictions. They had hypothesized that individuals with more experiences of adversity in childhood would be sensitized to stress, causing them to rate events as more severe. Instead, the opposite occurred.

People who reported higher levels of early adversity showed a “flatter” response pattern. This means that as the vignettes described increasingly severe events, their personal severity ratings did not climb as steeply as those of their peers. This pattern is consistent with a concept known as stress inoculation, where past exposure to manageable stressors may build resilience and lead to a blunted appraisal of later difficulties.

The investigation into personality found that neuroticism, a trait associated with a tendency to experience negative emotions, was also related to stress appraisal. The initial analysis showed that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism tended to rate all the vignettes as more severe on average, regardless of the event’s objective difficulty. This suggests a general tendency for people high in neuroticism to view life events through a more negative lens compared to those lower in the trait.

The findings for depression offered another layer of insight. Similar to neuroticism, individuals who had experienced more severe depression symptoms in the last year also rated the vignettes as more negative on average. However, depression was also linked to the rate of change in appraisals. As the researcher-rated severity of the events increased, the perceived severity ratings of people with more depression symptoms rose more steeply. This indicates a heightened reactivity to escalating stress.

Because neuroticism and depression are closely related, the researchers conducted a final analysis to determine which factor had a stronger, more unique relationship with stress appraisal. When both neuroticism and depression were considered in the same statistical model, the association with neuroticism disappeared. Depression, on the other hand, remained a significant predictor of both higher average severity ratings and the steeper increase in those ratings in response to more difficult events. This suggests that the heightened stress appraisal initially linked to neuroticism was better explained by its overlap with recent depression.

These results have important implications for understanding mental health. The connection between depression and heightened stress appraisal may point to a mechanism that helps sustain the condition. If an individual with depression perceives a stressful situation as excessively negative, they may be more likely to engage in behavioral withdrawal and feel less capable of coping. This response could prolong the stressor’s impact and, in turn, maintain or worsen depressive symptoms. Therapies for depression might benefit from focusing on restructuring these overly negative interpretations of life events.

However, the use of hypothetical vignettes may not fully capture how people appraise stressful events that happen in their own lives. Because the study design was correlational, it can identify a relationship between depression and stress appraisal, but it cannot prove that one causes the other. The findings are also based on a sample of university students, so they may not generalize to other populations, such as older adults or individuals in clinical settings. The researchers also did not measure participants’ perceived ability to cope with the stressors, which is another important aspect of appraisal.

Future research could explore these questions in different groups of people, including those with a clinical diagnosis of depression. It would also be beneficial to track individuals over time to see if their patterns of stress appraisal can predict the future course of their mental health. The study provides a novel and systematic method for investigating stress appraisal, highlighting its importance in models of depression risk. Examining individual differences in how people interpret stress is a vital step toward a more complete understanding of the pathways that link life events to psychopathology.

The study, “Association of early adversity, neuroticism, and depression with perceived severity ratings of stressful life event vignettes,” was authored by Elli Cole, Darha Ponder, Alessandra R. Grillo, Rachel Suresky, Catherine B. Stroud, and Suzanne Vrshek-Schallhorn.