Individualism and relatedness themes in the context of depression, gender, and a self-schema model of emotion

Relatedness and individualism themes are pervasive in psychology, extending across clinical, personality, well-being, social, developmental, assessment, and psychopatholopy domains. Individualism themes have been described using such terms as agency, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal control, and all independent self-construal. Relatedness themes are evident in the concepts of communion, positive relations with others, collectivism, sociotropy, and all interdependent self-construal. In this article, we first consider how these themes of individualism and relatedness may permeate our understanding of gender differences in both the rate and experience of depression. We then highlight the various ways that relatedness and individualism themes have been studied across several diverse research domains in psychology, focusing oil both the positive and negative variants of each construct. This review forms the basis for further establishing the importance of the themes of individualism and relatedness to depression. In doing so, we integrate these themes with a self-schema model of emotion, in which individual difference variables play a central role in emotional experiences, such as depression, for each individual. Our extension of this model focuses on determining the extent to which either relatedness or individualism, or some combination of both, may be central to a given person's experience of depression. Several applications of this self-schema model to a clinical context with depressed individuals are then highlighted. These include a need to understand more about both the content and function of relatedness self-schemata, and their possible implications for depressed individuals; a need to consider more fully the positive aspects of both relatedness and individualism self-schemata; a need to consider separate dysfunctional self-evaluative belief systems that may pertain to either individualism or relatedness; and, finally, a need to consider distinct types of self-esteem that may pertain specifically to either individualism or relatedness.