Teenage Girls Battle With Higher Amounts Of Stress Than Boys

The teenage years can be a time of constant struggle and confusion. Now, recent findings published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that girls are more likely than boys to deal with increased rates of depressive symptoms and troubled times.

"These findings draw our focus to the important role of stress as a potential causal factor in the development of vulnerabilities to depression, particularly among girls, and could change the way that we target risk for adolescent depression," said psychology researcher and lead author on the study, Jessica Hamilton of Temple University, in a news release. "Although there is a range of other vulnerabilities that contribute to the emergence of girls' higher rates of depression during adolescence, our study highlights an important malleable pathway that explains girls' greater risk of depression."

For the study, researchers examined data on 382 Caucasian and African American adolescents participating in an ongoing longitudinal study. The adolescents completed self-report measures evaluating cognitive vulnerabilities and depressive symptoms at an initial assessment and then completed three follow-up assessments that were each spaced about 7 months apart.

Throughout this time, researchers each took initial levels of cognitive vulnerabilities, depressive symptoms and sex into account.

Findings revealed that girls tended to show higher depressive symptoms at follow-up periods than boys did-while boys' symptoms seemed to decline following the initial assessments.

Furthermore, findings also revealed that girls seemed to be exposed to a greater number of interpersonal dependent stressors during that time, with analyses that suggests that it is this exposure to stressorts that maintained girls' higher levels of rumination that put them at risk for depression over time.

"Parents, educators, and clinicians should understand that girls' greater exposure to interpersonal stressors places them at risk for vulnerability to depression and ultimately, depression itself," concluded Hamilton. "Thus, finding ways to reduce exposure to these stressors or developing more effective ways of responding to these stressors may be beneficial for adolescents, especially girls."