Dépression clinique

Quantitative and Qualitative Insights into Emotional Interaction Patterns in Families with Clinically Depressed and Non-Depressed Adolescents

Abstract

Stolar MN, Lech M, Sheeber LB, Allen NB

Emotional interactions between parents and their children are known to have a significant effect on the development and recurrence of clinical depression in children. While speech models used by existing conversation modeling algorithms can provide information about frequency of speech-silence states, the modeling process itself does not provide qualitative insights into the nature of the emotional process that underlies the speakers’ behavior. To address this issue, a recently proposed higher order emotional influence model (HOEIM) was applied to determine the extent to which “emotional influences” (interpreted as the values of the model coefficients) differed between families with depressed and non-depressed adolescents. The analysis was based on four speaker states: positive emotion, negative emotion, neutral emotion, and silence. The HOEIM estimated the conditional probabilities of these states in parent-child conversations in 29 families with clinically depressed adolescents (14-18 years old) and in 31 families with non-depressed adolescents. The trajectories of the model coefficients displayed across model orders increasing from 1 to 5 (corresponding to the memory time of past emotional states ranging from 1 to 5 seconds) indicated that parent-child interactions were significantly different between these two types of family environments, and the nature of these interactions clearly depended on the topic of conversation.