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The Social Environment and Psychopathology

University of Pittsburgh

The present paper describes a research program designed to investigate features of the social environment that may influence the development or maintenance of psychopathology. The guiding philosophy has been to understand the processes through which general social constructs, such as social support and life stress, may modulate vulnerability to psychological disorder. Over a number of years, the program has focused specifically upon depression and its episodic nature, attempting to explain the onset and remission of the disorder with respect to life stress and interpersonal environments. The concepts studied, however, are intimately tied to pathological functioning in diverse ways, only some of which are informative for developing descriptive models of the processes involved. The paper describes several strategies for controlling spurious influences (e.g. self-report biases in retrospective reporting of life stress and social relationships in depression). These strategies provide a foundation for uncovering the features of life stress and interpersonal relationships that may be important in the development, maintenance, remission and recurrence of depression. After reporting several studies devoted to these issues, the paper concludes with suggestions for deepening understanding of the interplay between life stress, social relationships and psychopathology.

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