Bidirectional Relations Between Daily Perceived Stress and Individual Symptoms of Depression

A large body of evidence indicates that stress both precipitates and results from depression. Although there are some exceptions, most of this research has treated depression as a unitary construct and has examined these bidirectional relations over long periods of time. The purpose of the present study was to examine bidirectional relations between perceived stress and individual symptoms of depression from one day to the next. Participants (N = 363) completed a 28-daily diary protocol in which they reported on daily levels of perceived stress and levels of individual depressive symptoms. Results of bivariate multilevel vector autoregressions demonstrated that higher levels of perceived stress significantly predicted higher levels of anhedonia, poor appetite, insomnia, psychomotor retardation, failure, indecision, fatigue, and active suicidal ideation on the next day. In addition, higher levels of concentration difficulties significantly predicted higher levels of perceived stress on the following day. Results of the present study add to our understanding of how perceived stress may contribute to proximal increases in depression as well as how depression may contribute to increased levels of perceived stress.