Externally Contingent and Unstable Self‐Worth as Predictors of Depression in College Women: A 3‐Month Study

Undergraduate women completed measures of externally contingent self-worth, self-esteem instability, and depression at the beginning (Time 1) and again 3 months later near the end (Time 2) of an academic semester. Findings indicated that when Time I depression scores were controlled for, each Time I facet of self-esteem made significant contributions to Time 2 depression scores. Implications of these findings for the counseling of depressed college students are discussed. Keywords: self-worth, self-esteem instability, depression ********** Over the course of an academic semester, college students are likely to experience multiple stresses, performance demands, and evaluative pressures that may heighten their risk for depression. Moreover, there is evidence that college women may be especially vulnerable to such risks. For example, when compared with their male counterparts, women are twice as likely to develop depression (Huckert & Krampen, 2010; Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001), and a higher proportion of college women than college men report being in treatment and receiving medication for depression (Fabiano, Stark, & Lindsey, 2009). College women also evidenced higher mean levels of both depression and stress compared with college men (Dixon & Robinson Kurpius, 2008). Therefore, identifying predictors of college women's depression risk is an important focus of inquiry with potential implications for preventive and therapeutic interventions. Although depression is often assumed to reflect low self-esteem, some contemporary scholars have argued that particular facets of self-esteem, such as its relative stability and whether or not it is based on externally contingent appraisals of self-worth, are better predictors of performance and adjustment indicators than are global self-esteem levels. Indeed, given evidence that women are more attentive and responsive than are men to interpersonal feedback and social approval/validation (Cambron, Acitelli, & Pettit, 2009) and are more likely than men to express concerns about their weight and body shape (Grossbard, Lee, Neighbors, & Larimer, 2009), contingent forms of self-esteem may especially enhance college women's vulnerability to depression. Contemporary Views of Self-Esteem Self-esteem is arguably one of the most researched of all psychological constructs (Trzesniewski, Donnellan, & Robins, 2003; Watson, Suls, & Haig, 2002). Much of the voluminous literature on self-esteem has both conceptualized and measured self-esteem as a global, stable, and affectively loaded index of self-worth that can range from high to low, with low scores assumed to forecast depression and adjustment difficulties. However, in their comprehensive review of the self-esteem literature, Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, and Vohs (2003) challenged this conclusion. They noted that efforts to link scores on measures of global self-esteem, such as the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), to motivational and adjustment outcomes have yielded weak, inconsistent, or conflicting findings. Their conclusions support the value of adopting a more multidimensional view of the role of self-esteem in predicting depression (Roberts & Monroe, 1994). Relatedly, contemporary scholars (Crocker & Park, 2004; Kernis, 2005; Kernis, Paradise, Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000; Myers & Zeigler-Hill, 2008) have argued that self-esteem has both stable and dynamic features and that prior studies using global measures of the overall level of self-esteem to predict depression and other adjustment outcomes may have masked this complexity by not sensitively assessing particular features of self-esteem vulnerability that contribute to depression risk. Evidence is now accumulating that, unlike global indexes of self-esteem, more specific components of self-esteem, such as whether it is based on external contingencies of self-worth or is subjectively experienced as fluctuating, are particularly linked to depression risk. …