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The Role Of Cognitive Factors In The Development Of Seasonal Affective Disorder Episodes, Stacy Whitcomb-Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent literature on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has begun to focus on diathesis stress models, including Young and colleagues' (1 991) Dual Vulnerability Hypothesis (DVH). The DVH posits that individuals must possess both a biological vulnerability to developing vegetative symptoms and a psychological vulnerability to developing mood symptoms in order to develop SAD episodes. Such a model addresses SAD as well as non-seasonal depression, and suggests that there may be an as yet unidentified group suffering fiom only the biological vulnerability (i.e., winter anergia). However, until very recently few studies have directly tested this model, and most have focused on …