Toward the Russian Language Questionnaire for Assessment of Psychosocial Risk Factors: A Tool for Study of the Role of Psychosocial Environment in Experience of Soul Seasonality

Kamilla F. Urakaeva

    Seasonality of manic-depressive forms of mental disorders is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Approximately 10% of affective disorders have a season-depended course (Faedda et al., 1993). The story of the first scientific report on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a unique historical case, because this condition and the method of choice for its treatment were predicted by fundamental research in the field of chronobiology rather than by medical practice (Lewy et al., 1982; Rosenthal et al., 1984a). Due to that, the biological basis of this relatively recently described depressive disorder has been extensively studied. However, neither original nor further suggested biological explanations of the etiology of this disorder were fully supported by the experimental evidence. The hypothesis suggested more recently by Putilov (2000) applies an evolutionary psychological approach to explanation of SAD and depression in general. This hypothesis predicts that the biochemical and physiological responses to periodical changes in physical environment do not play a central role in the manifestation of SAD symptoms. Although they are necessary to trigger mood response, the critical role is played by the psychological responses to changes in psychosocial environment. The psychosocial risk factors for SAD are not necessarily to be seasonal, and their significance would be very high for development of symptoms of any form of depression, either seasonal or non-seasonal. The major aim of the project is to test the predictions of the evolutionary psychological explanation of SAD etiology in terms of contribution of psychosocial environment to the manifestation of seasonality in Siberian women of reproductive age. On the present stage of the project, I finished the wording of the statements for an initial item list of Russian language questionnaire that will be applied for assessment of psychosocial risk factors in the samples from general population (see the Appendixes). Now I have started the collection of the data using three questionnaires - the initial version of the questionnaire for assessment of psychosocial environment and personal life experience and satisfaction (QAPEPLES) (see Appendixes), the short version of the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire (SPAQ) (modified after Rosenthal et al., 1984a), and the 29-item Structured Interview Guide for the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale: Seasonal Affective Disorder (SIGH-SAD) (Williams et al., 1988). The work will be resulted in 1) development of the Russian language questionnaire for assessment of psychosocial risk factors, and 2) measurement of the association of these factors with seasonality of mood and current level of SAD symptoms in Siberian women of reproductive age.