Self-criticism, failure, and depressive affect: A test of personality-event congruence and symptom specificity

Diathesis-stress models of cognitive vulnerability to depression posit that personality factors (e.g., self-criticism) interact with congruent negative life events to produce distinct depressive symptom clusters. The present study employed a stress-induction procedure to assess whether self-criticism would interact with achievement-related failure to increase introjective depressive affect in a nonclinical sample. Hypotheses were generally supported with respect to introjective depressive affect reported immediately following the stress-induction procedure. However, self-criticism did not interact with achievement failure in predicting depressive affect reported 24 hours later.