The hypothesis that depression is linked to personality can be traced to antiquity, when Hippocrates, and later Galen, argued that particular “humors” were responsible for specific personality types and forms of psychopathology. In this article, we discuss the major conceptual models that have been proposed to explain the association between personality and depression, comment on some important methodological issues, and selectively review the empirical literature. Due to space limitations, we limit our review to nonbipolar forms of depression.
