RESEARCH ARTICLE Mood-Reactive Self-Esteem and Depression Vulnerability: Person-Specific Symptom Dynamics via Smart Phone Assessment

Cognitive theories of depression suggest that mood-reactive self-esteem, a pattern of cog-nitive reactivity where low self-esteem is temporally dependent on levels of sadness, repre-sents 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 sadness and self-esteem as they unfold naturally, over time. In this study we used participants ’ smartphones to collect multiple daily ratings of sad-ness and self-esteem over three weeks, in the real world. We then applied dynamic factor modeling to explore theoretically driven hypotheses about the temporal dependency of self-esteem on sadness (i.e., mood-reactive self-esteem) and its relationship to indices of de-pression vulnerability both contemporaneously (e.g., rumination, sad mood persistence) and prospectively (e.g., future symptomatology). In sum, individuals who demonstrated mood-reactive self-esteem reported higher levels of rumination at baseline, more persistent sad mood over three weeks, and increased depression symptoms at the end of three weeks above and beyond a trait-like index of self-esteem. The integration of smartphone assess-ment and person-specific analytics employed in this study offers an exiting new avenue to advance the study and treatment of depression