Control-related beliefs and depression among clinic-referred children and adolescents.

Does childhood depression involve a perceived lack of control? The answer may depend on which dimension of control one examines. Here, building on recent theory, we distinguished between two dimensions: beliefs about the contingency of outcomes and beliefs about one's own competence to perform outcome-relevant behavior. Three separate groups of clinic-referred children (aged 8-17} were sampled, one before therapy and two afterward. In all three groups, low levels of perceived competence were significantly correlated with children's Childhood Depression Inventory (CDI) scores. Multiple regression analyses with several predictors revealed that, in each sample, competence beliefs accounted for substantial unique variance in CDI scores. In contrast, contingency beliefs were not correlated with CDI scores in any of the samples. Finally, CDI scores were consistently correlated with attributions of success and failure to "unknown" causes. Overall, the results link childhood depression to perceived incompetence and to "contingency uncertainty," but not to perceived noncontingency. This suggests, in turn, that children may be more susceptible to "personal helplessness" forms of depression than to forms identified with "universal helplessness."