Depressive Symptoms and Distress Tolerance: Associations with Risky Sexual Behaviors

Risky sexual behaviors (RSB) are a significant public health concern in the United States. Better understanding factors related to RSB has important implications for the prevention of such behaviors and the alleviation of the corresponding public health burden. Depressive symptomatology has well-established associations with RSB, but few studies have examined this association in combination with other leading RSB risk factors. This study looked at the unique and interactive contributions of depressive symptoms and distress tolerance with regard to RSB above and beyond the contributions of theoretically relevant covariates of substance use and PTSD symptoms. Data was collected on 138 cocaine dependent adults. However, due to several reasons detailed below, including poor measures of reliability and positive skew with the outcome variables, the planned analyses could not be run. The authors discussed these problems below and indicated several other limitations of the study. Future directions were proposed.